Updating the Hippocratic Oath to include medicine's social contract
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CONTEXT: It is widely understood that reciting a contemporary version of the Hippocratic Oath has two purposes. It constitutes a public commitment on the part of the prospective doctor to preserving the traditional values of the medical profession and to meeting the obligations expected of a doctor. It is also an important symbolic ritual in the process of professional identity formation. METHODS: A portion of the 1964 version of the Hippocratic Oath is examined for its relevance to the current practice of medicine. Its closing paragraph reads: 'If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, be respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.' This is interpreted as representing the doctor's expectations of the practice of medicine: job satisfaction; status, and prestige. It also conveys the understanding that enjoying these benefits is contingent upon the doctor's adherence to the terms of the Oath. CONCLUSIONS: Our current understanding of the relationship between medicine and society is that a social contract exists under which members of the profession are granted a privileged position in society on the understanding that they will meet society's reasonable expectations. These expectations entail obligations not only to patients and to the profession, but to wider society. The Oath under consideration, which concentrates on medicine's obligations to patients and to the profession, does not adequately reflect its obligations to society. It is suggested that versions of the Hippocratic Oath used in the future should be updated to better reflect the obligations of both individual doctors and the medical profession to society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.044 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".