The physician and professionalism today: challenges to and strategies for ethical professional medical practice
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INTRODUCTION
Open Access
The physician and professionalism today: challenges to and strategies for ethical professional medical practice Jean-Pierre Unger1*, Ingrid Morales2, Pierre De Paepe1 and Michel Roland3
Keywords: Medical professionalism, Medical education, Medical research, Public health, Health management, Health policy
Medicine in the twenty-first century Imagine that physicians could multiply their impact on people’s health and improve community health whilst tailoring the delivery of care to each individual patient. The ambit of the present supplement is to say how, with a public health insight into medical practice and physicians’ professionalism. But clouds obscure the future of the medical profession. Artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to make it obsolete. The commoditisation of care undermines ethics. Bureaucracy is infiltrating practice. Worldwide, cultures are turning materialistic. However, some physicians are resisting these trends. In spite of being well paid, the suicide rate of physicians in the United States is the highest of all occupations, almost twice the national average, and higher than in the military [1]. Taking decisions against one’s intimate convictions partly explains that [2]. To help doctors surmount this existential crisis and resist harsh intangible work conditions, this collection of articles gives them reasons to believe in the survival of medicine as a profession. To do so, the series elaborates on the changes needed in medical culture to keep medical practice as a sacred art, concentrating on what AI does not do or does not do well, especially ethical thinking. With such cultural changes, physicians would impose on AI design the function to support professional * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Department of Public Health, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Nationalestraat 155, B-2000 Antwerp, Belgium Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
endeavour and undermine the opposite process that transforms professionals in technicians. To remain in control, the doctor’s intelligence, emotions, knowledge, communication, ethics, and creativity will have to surpass those of AI, not only in delivering biopsychosocial, ethical care but also in another, insufficiently explored domain that is, in improving collective health with clinical medicine. Since taxes finance doctors, societies are entitled to demand them to optimise their impact on collective health whilst tailoring healthcare to the patient’s individual needs as much as possible. To meet the practicalities of such a paradoxical norm, the series advocates and delineates the practical and theoretical integration of clinical and public health practice to meet the challenges that medicine faces to survive as a profession, be they financial, political, managerial, or socio-cultural. In practice, clinicians need to think and act whilst bearing in mind community health stakes - a duty, the importance of which has been clearly demonstrated by the Covid-19 crisis. Conversely, public h
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