Ethnics, medicine, and society in the Caribbean

ABSTRACT

While the Medical Faculty of the University of the West Indies has produced many outstanding scholars and practitioners over the past 50 years, social processes in many Caribbean countries have resulted in much suffering. Despite this, the social roots of disease and suffering often have been left out of our medical teaching and ethical discussions. The moral basis of medical care is oriented not only by the individual suffering of patients, but also by the collective experiences of humankind. Hence, failure to engage the social aspects of suffering undermines the moral and pragmatic aspects of medical practice. In the Caribbean, if you are poor, you are likely to have a poor health status. So ethically, medicine and medical teaching need to respond to social suffering, as health and social problems are inseparable. Moreover, the last 3 decades have all seen the call for respect for persons and justice as important values in medical practice in many societies. These values have given medicine its contemporary identify, stressing the paramountcy of the welfare of the patient, the need for informed consent, the requirement to make decent health care equitably available to all, and the importance of empathy and kindness as hallmarks of humane medical care. Historically, the practice of medicine has rested on two pillars medical knowledge and expertise, and irreproachable medical conduct. Unfortunately, in the Caribbean society a huge discrepancy exists in the time and attention paid to these essential pillars. Nearly all of a doctor's occupations have ethical implications due to the nature of care involving persons therefore medical teaching and conferences that focus only on the scientific and technical aspects of medicine, without addressing the ethics of care for patients or the developing and improving of the ethical competence of students and practitioners, are incomplete.(AU)