Do no harm : how modern medicine challenges the ethics of doctors

When we're ill, we put our trust in doctors who promise to put our wellbeing first and pledge to do us no harm.

But medicine's expanding capabilities and soaring costs threaten to make this commitment obsolete. Increasingly, warns Gregg Bloche, society is calling upon physicians to ration care and to put their skills to use on behalf of insurance companies, hospital bureaucrats, government officials, and the courts. Doctors are answering this call, putting patient trust at risk, and endangering citizens' liberty and privacy. A leading health policy expert with a background in medicine, law and journalism, Bloche has investigated abuses of medical ethics and human rights in the United States and abroad, and he has advised national policymakers and presidential candidates. In this book, he evocatively communicates the tensions and emotions of both doctors and patients as he takes on a wide variety of complex ethical situations, including how: * doctors have double agendas, as caregivers and arbiters of cost, compromising their ability to prioritize patient needs. * medicine has become a weapon in America's "culture wars" over such matters as abortion, assisted suicide, and the rights of gays and lesbians * doctors decide, under pressure from insurers and hospital administrators, to discontinue potentially life-saving treatment, even when patients and family members object.

Challenging, provocative, and insightful Do No Harm breaks the code of silence shrouding medicine's routine departure from the promise of uncompromising loyalty to patients.

It is a powerful warning about the need for doctors to forge a new compact with patients and society.

This is a hard hitting message for the medical community and anyone who has ever been a patient.