4 ms·
I don't know how much of a solution it is, but I think there could be some bureaucratic/authoritarian pushback against this kind of thing if the American Medica
by _delirium 13y ago
I don't know how much of a solution it is, but I think there could be some bureaucratic/authoritarian pushback against this kind of thing if the American Medical Association more stringently enforced its ethics rules relating to the Hippocratic Oath. As a baseline, medical procedures should be for the benefit of a patient and performed with their consent, otherwise they are inappropriate and a breach of professional ethics.
This is already enforced stringently in one very narrow domain: licensed doctors cannot assist states in either conducting, or even planning the preparations for, their processes of death penalty by lethal injection. This has caused them some practical problems, because they basically have to get amateur doctors to give advice. The AMA's rationale is that executing someone is not a legitimate medical treatment, and definitely doesn't have consent. But this principle seems like it should apply more broadly than the fairly extreme case of actually executing someone.
- gnu8 13y agoThe AMA and other relevant organizations have been turning a blind eye to the torture of POWs by the United States. To date, no doctor who has tortured prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has been sanctioned, where they should rightfully be stripped of their licenses and put into prison. I don't know of any case where a doctor has actually participated in an execution, but it seems doubtful whether anything would actually happen to them.