Medicine is a special field, with unique concerns that don't have exact analogues in any other professional field. It involves very difficult and sensitive decisions, sometimes with potentially life-altering or life-or-death ramifications, and we have seen this a number of times across the Trek TV series and films.
There are also questions of propriety when it comes to a doctor having a romantic relationship with a current or former patient, or even just being friends on a social level with said patients. I would say the latter is probably impossible to avoid, and nobody seems to criticize McCoy and Boyce for being drinking buddies with their captains, who are also their patients.
In nearly every discussion of medical ethics in Trek, whether the issue is destruction of non-sentient clones, doctor-patient romance, end-of-life decisions, administering a treatment that the patient would object to without the patient's consent, etc., the Hippocratic Oath is usually invoked in short order, as if it's some kind of absolute and unchanging law.
True, the general concept of "do no harm" has been invoked by doctors in Trek on a number of occasions. But what do the specifics entail? The medical field changes a lot over time. Today, the physician is less and less somebody who holds "authority" over patients, as we have instead moved into an era of patient empowerment, education and informed consent; as well as advance written directives and powers of attorney that doctors must be subordinate to when they administer treatment. The physician may be seen as more of a service provider.
Even the original Hippocratic Oath has plenty of things that are completely irrelevant and disregarded today: swearing before gods that nobody believes in anymore, taking care of your medical teacher's needs (which assumes that a physician would have had only one teacher, instead of a whole medical school faculty), and teaching that teacher's kids the art of medicine for free, not performing surgery on people (because at the time only barbers were "trained in this craft" and not doctors), etc.
Today, medical schools that administer the Hippocratic Oath use a modernized version, and many instead use something different such as the Declaration of Geneva, or a particular oath that they came up with themselves. Such oaths are not legally binding, and there is ongoing debate among medical professionals about how appropriate and relevant they are, as many are just vague formal platitudes that are arguably inadequate in addressing the complex realities of contemporary medical practice, and don't really even hold physicians accountable for acting contrary to the oath.
And moving forward four hundred years into the future, any oaths that doctors may take at that time would likely be different again. So how relevant should our 21st-century concepts of medical ethics really be in the bizarre universe of Star Trek?
Kor
There are also questions of propriety when it comes to a doctor having a romantic relationship with a current or former patient, or even just being friends on a social level with said patients. I would say the latter is probably impossible to avoid, and nobody seems to criticize McCoy and Boyce for being drinking buddies with their captains, who are also their patients.
In nearly every discussion of medical ethics in Trek, whether the issue is destruction of non-sentient clones, doctor-patient romance, end-of-life decisions, administering a treatment that the patient would object to without the patient's consent, etc., the Hippocratic Oath is usually invoked in short order, as if it's some kind of absolute and unchanging law.
True, the general concept of "do no harm" has been invoked by doctors in Trek on a number of occasions. But what do the specifics entail? The medical field changes a lot over time. Today, the physician is less and less somebody who holds "authority" over patients, as we have instead moved into an era of patient empowerment, education and informed consent; as well as advance written directives and powers of attorney that doctors must be subordinate to when they administer treatment. The physician may be seen as more of a service provider.
Even the original Hippocratic Oath has plenty of things that are completely irrelevant and disregarded today: swearing before gods that nobody believes in anymore, taking care of your medical teacher's needs (which assumes that a physician would have had only one teacher, instead of a whole medical school faculty), and teaching that teacher's kids the art of medicine for free, not performing surgery on people (because at the time only barbers were "trained in this craft" and not doctors), etc.
Today, medical schools that administer the Hippocratic Oath use a modernized version, and many instead use something different such as the Declaration of Geneva, or a particular oath that they came up with themselves. Such oaths are not legally binding, and there is ongoing debate among medical professionals about how appropriate and relevant they are, as many are just vague formal platitudes that are arguably inadequate in addressing the complex realities of contemporary medical practice, and don't really even hold physicians accountable for acting contrary to the oath.
And moving forward four hundred years into the future, any oaths that doctors may take at that time would likely be different again. So how relevant should our 21st-century concepts of medical ethics really be in the bizarre universe of Star Trek?
Kor
