Model Resolutions

RESOLUTION CONCERNING THE DECLARATION OF PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY

WHEREAS: the "Declaration of Professional Responsibility: Medicine's Social Contract with Humanity," originating in the World Medical Association and presented by the AMA to the Federation for approval, is a radical departure from traditional medical ethics such as embodied in the Oath of Hippocrates, and

WHEREAS: a contract implies two or more parties mutually agreeing to the terms, and neither "medicine" nor "humanity" is a person capable of making a contract, and

WHEREAS: physicians have a professional and fiduciary relationship with individual patients, not with the whole of humanity; and

WHEREAS: the Declaration implies that the welfare of individual patients could be sacrificed to a political authority's view of the collective good; and

WHEREAS: the clause concerning the obligation to "advocate for social, economic, and political changes…that ameliorate suffering" could be considered a proxy clause whereby the AMA could assume it has the authority to advocate whatever social/political agenda it chooses and claim the full support of the entire profession; and

WHEREAS: the Declaration can be read as abrogating the right of physicians to choose the patients whom they will serve and the conditions under which they will work,

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED: that the _____ Association (decline to support or rescind its support) for the AMA/WMA Declaration of Professional Responsibility.