Ethics - black & white??

     Investment advisers, CEOs, clergy, politicians, lawyers, accountants, police, and yes - health-care professionals - lie, cheat, steal, engage in every conceivable means of betraying the public's trust. A real earth-shaker in my area of professional interest was the Sudbø case (below).

     "A stunning admission of fraud from a respected Norwegian oral cancer researcher, Jon Sudbø, M.D., Ph.D., D.D.S., has left the cancer research community reeling. According to statements from his hospital and his attorney, Sudbø fabricated data for 900 patients in a study published in October in The Lancet, which has now retracted the article. He also 'fundamentally mishandled' data for a 2001 article in The New England Journal of Medicine and a 2005 article in Journal of Clinical Oncology.

      Eva Szabo, M.D., who oversees prevention trials for upper aerodigestive cancers at NCI, said in a statement that the institute is reviewing 'the entire portfolio' of oral cancer grants to see which others, if any, drew scientific justification from Sudbø's fabrications. ..."                   http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/98/6/374.full

     Even the liberals among us tend to morph into hanging judges when it comes to serious breaches in medical ethics. We're disgusted and firmly feel that we could never do that! Short of capital punishment, we really want to distance ourselves from such depravity as definitively as possible.

     The problem is that we can't. We are not qualitatively different from these "perps." Each of us has the potential to do anything - from unimaginably horrible to unimaginably wonderful - given the wrong / right circumstances. If we suppress and deny our "dark side," it's much more likely to bubble up as unethical behavior. Health-care professionals tend to be more outwardly oriented than introspective - a real handicap!

         Ethical breaches are disgusting, should bring severe penalties, BUT perpetrators are one of us fallible, at times horrible & idiotic, always fragile, immature yet ever-so-slowly maturing, wonderful creatures.

     “Be kind, everyone is carrying a heavy load.”       Anon

Photo: Colin Bates   http://www.coastalimageworks.com/