Yes, I believe that it is unethical to be a religious doctor. This argument can be made quite easily. The ethical doctor’s role is to provide the best treatment possible for the patient. Currently, the best way to accomplish this is through evidence based medicine aka science. It is therefore unethical to not provide treatment that has been shown to work through evidence based medicine.

I realize that it is still physically possible to provide good treatment to a patient while holding religious beliefs, however they can’t fully have faith in the treatment while holding religious beliefs.

Science and religion are incompatible. Anyone that begs to differ hasn’t read enough evidence or hasn’t thought about it enough. Ethically, a doctor needs have complete faith in evidence based medicine.

How’s that for stirring up a bit of controversy? This argument still needs a bit of work and I will develop it further in the future.

This song is worth a listen. It has a great ending….orthopods rock!!! Music is by Adam Kay and Suman Biswas (aka the Amateur Transplants) from their album Fitness to Practice.

Open Medicine is a new open-access Medical Journal. It is free to access and no subscription is required. They have released two peer-reviewed issues so far. One of the ideas behing Open Medicine is to promote international collaboration and dialogue.

I believe that projects similar to this are very important for society. I am still disappointed that good scientific literature is not available to the masses. Currently, it is only available free and practically to university students. The general population should not be getting their science news for newspapers’ “pseudo-science” sections. It is amazing how many articles that use bad science get publish in peer-reviewed journals. This bad-sciense is amplified in the newspapers and pseudo-science articles that the general population read.

Stop reading the newspaper and start reading a journal!!!!

www.openmedicine.ca