Bioethics has hardened into an activist ideology that pervades the medical world, the schools, and government.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The growing professional disciplines of medical ethics and bioethics have had a profound impact on researchers, bedside doctors, associations of physicians, and government.
I actually completely suck at being a bioethicist. What I do is history of medicine and patient advocacy. Patient advocacy is actually the opposite of bioethics, because bioethicists are the people who increasingly set up and justify the systems we patient advocates have to fight.
Instead of the traditional emphasis on the sanctity of life, bioethics began to stress the quality of life, meaning that many damaged humans, young and old, don't qualify for personhood because their lives have lost value.
The politics have always been difficult in medicine. There is some truth in the way medical practice is portrayed in TV dramas.
We slow the progress of science today for all sorts of ethical reasons. Biomedicine could advance much faster if we abolished our rules on human experimentation in clinical trials, as Nazi researchers did.
I find it greatly disturbing that the Bush administration has used political and religious ideologies to influence national policy on science and medicine.
Medicine, the only profession that labors incessantly to destroy the reason for its existence.
To me, politics is an extension of what I do in medicine.
A lot of the differences between people have biologic underpinnings. Now, we have a dogma of egalitarianism. Everyone's the same.
The medical profession is - and knows itself to be - endemically conservative and conformist.