Medical Students Lack Training in Military Ethics: Researchers
Nov 5th, 2007 • Posted in: NewsBOSTON
U.S. medical students receive insufficient instruction about military medical ethics and a physician’s moral responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions, according to a report last week from Harvard Medical School.
The Harvard Crimson reports that of 1,700 medical students surveyed nationwide, a third did not know that the Geneva Conventions require doctors to treat the sickest first, regardless of nationality.
A similar proportion did not know that depriving prisoners of food and water for extended periods was prohibited by the Conventions, reports the Washington Post.
Only about 37 percent of the medical students correctly affirmed that the Geneva Conventions apply irrespective of whether war had been formally declared.
According to a summary of the findings in TIME magazine, more that a quarter of respondents said they would, if ordered, threaten detainees by deceptively telling them they were to be given psychotropic drugs, or pretend to give a lethal injection that was actually harmless saline. Six percent said they would actually kill a detainee with a lethal injection if so ordered.
TIME quotes Dr. Steve Miles, a medical ethicist and author, as saying it may not be necessary to teach medical students chapter and verse of ethics and law as they apply to torture. Instead, he contends, there is a more overarching skill that doctors need: the ability to say no, whether to a commander who wants a prisoner tortured or to an HMO that wants to conceal the benefits of an expensive new treatment.
“Every doctor is going to wind up in a dual-loyalty situation,” Miles told TIME. “The answer is to remember that a doctor’s first objective is to relieve suffering — not to cause it.”
More than 70 percent of military doctors are directly recruited from civilian medical schools, according to the study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of the International Journal of Health Services.
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