Why good doctors do bad things (Harvard U Gazette)

Ethics body proposed to sort out conflicts between military, medical roles

<snip> The conflicting aims of the military - to kill or defeat the enemy, and the doctor - to save lives, sets up a situation where military medical doctors can be faced with conflicting loyalties toward the patients they're supposed to help and the military organization and fellow soldiers they serve with.

Those conflicts sometimes result in a physician advising or participating in "coercive interrogation," or torture. <snip>

Miles detailed the participation of U.S. military medical personnel in alleged human rights abuses in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. Medical personnel were regularly integrated into interrogation teams, providing advice on how much "coercion" an inmate could take and signing off on specific interrogation plans.

Further, Miles asserted, U.S. medical personnel falsified documents to hide injuries and deaths, failed to report human rights abuses, and turned over medical records to aid the design of interrogation plans. <snip>

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2005/03.03/11-abu.html

Isn't that the oath they take as physicians? Any physician who in any way, assists with abuse and torture, should lose their license to practice medicine.
Period.

The law regulates what physicians can and can't do. If some part of the government gets a physician to do something contrary to the Hippocratic Oath, too bad.

Incidentally, the Hippocratic Oath also forbids abortion.

--p!