Modern medicine is veering away from the traditional Hippocratic Oath that required physicians to do no harm and use their knowledge and skills solely for the purpose of healing the patient, says psychiatrist and bioethics expert Dr. Aaron Kheriaty.
Now, physicians are euthanizing patients, removing healthy organs in certain transgender-related surgeries, and injecting drugs for late-term abortions even when the mother’s life is not threatened.
Hippocratic principles are being superseded by utilitarian ethics that prioritize the “greater good” over the well-being and rights of individual patients, Kheriaty says. That’s fueling, for instance, the push to expand the dead-donor eligibility criteria for organ donations.
It’s also manifesting in the push to adopt technological advancements like germ-line gene editing that could be used to create “designer babies” or in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), a process that uses stem cells, such as those derived from skin cells, to create human eggs and sperm in a lab.
Earlier this year, an op-ed in the MIT Technology Review argued for the creation of “spare” human bodies called “bodyoids.” These would essentially be human bodies created in laboratories from human stem cells, but without brains or consciousness. Proponents say they would revolutionize medical research and drug testing and create an unlimited supply of organs.
It sounds like the stuff of science fiction. What are the true ethical implications? Is this really where we want medicine to go?
Kheriaty is the director of the bioethics and American democracy program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and former director of the medical ethics program at UCI Health.
His latest book is titled “Making the Cut: How to Heal Modern Medicine.”
“The biggest advance [that] medicine needs to make is to accept the limits of medicine,” he says.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
