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Is the new professionalism and ACP's new ethics really just about following guidelines?

The Charter ( Medical Professionalism in the New Millennium.A Physician's Charter) did not deal with just the important relationship of ...

Saturday, October 15, 2005

AMA offer programs on lesions we should learn from Nazi doctors.

Beginning in 2004,Tte AMA's Institute for Ethics and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. have offered a lecture series that examines Nazi Medicine and offers perspective on what can be learned from this dark (darkest?) chapter in medical history. A recent AMA newspaper editorial reports that the program has been presented to 12 med schools so far. All of the schools should sign up for this. I did not learn of the incredible behavior of many German doctors until long after I graduated from medical school and I heard nothing about it in college or high school. Here is the link for the AMA web site.CME credit may be obtained. The book " The Nazi Doctors" by Robert Jay Lifton give details of the behavior of individuals who were physicians in name only that is so chilling that I have no words to express the magnitude of the horror. The terrible things that have been done in the name of the "greater good " and the sacrifice of the individual to the collective and when individual responsibility is removed know no bounds.

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