Sanity Returns to Renal Transplant Ethics Discussions

Obviously there have to be some exceptions to the general rule that a medical ethics course is not required of medical students, given the thousands of medical schools around the world, but the point about the defective knowledge of most physicians regarding the philosophical discipline of ethics stands. When I was at the University of Berlin in 1984, our course on medical ethics was NOT required, and this was standard throughout Germany. When I went to the course on the first day, there were only four students there out of a class of 300 -- three Arab students and me, and the only reason the Arab students were there was because they were foreigners and were not in the loop so did not pick up on the fact that the course was not required. Later, in 1994, I took the Royal Society of Apothecaries diploma course on medical ethics in London, which was run as a seminar. The comments I heard from the physicians there were embarrassingly primitive. So I stand by my generlization that, apart from that small group of physicians with separate philosophical training, physicians do not know enough about ethics to be put in charge, as the law allows them to be, of their patient's moral autonomy over their own bodies.