March 2, 2011 – Sirach 38

v. 14 got me thinking about Doctors.  I have been hearing a lot about abortion lately.  But this just doesn’t make you think about abortion, but any kind of medical practitioner who does not have some type of moral basis.  They don’t have to be Catholic, but I would hope they would have some moral foundation that they start from.  When they look at a sick person, are they looking at someone they will work to make better or are they thinking about how much is this going to cost, how much am I going to make.  I understand that there are many doctors out there who do an excellent job of following their morals and treating patients with respect, but sometimes you wonder if they are a majority or a minority.  With the way the world is leaning to the side of secular thinking and taking God out of every aspect of our lives, I believe it is a fair question to question where our doctors morals really lie.  I am an attorney and I know what I was groomed to think in law school.  Even though we have ethics that we study and have to continue our education, I can’t say that we were taught that morals are the foundation of what we stand on.  The law may have started there, but laws are changed by majorities, and by ideas of “fairness”, and by whose money you have in your pocket.  And laws are what we have to follow.  I can argue that something isn’t morally correct until I am blue in the face, but if the law is not on my side I cannot win in a court room. 

I didn’t go to med school, so I don’t know the culture from which Doctors are churned out.  All I know is that when doctors don’t have morals as their foundation, the patient can take a back seat to profits or research or someone who is “more important” or “more valuable”.  It is scary sometimes thinking about the people that we lay our lives in the hands of and trust in them that they have the best in mind for us.