What is the essence of medical ethics?

The essence of medical ethics is the theory of medical ethics.

Medical ethics is a subject that uses general ethical principles to solve medical moral problems and medical moral phenomena in the process of medical and health practice and medical development. It is an important part of medicine and a branch of ethics. Medical ethics is a science that uses the theory and method of ethics to study the moral problems of the relationship between people, people and society, and people and nature in the medical field.

Medical ethics comes from the particularity of doctor-patient relationship in medical work. Patients generally rely on the professional knowledge and skills of medical staff when seeking medical treatment, and it is often impossible to judge the quality of medical treatment; Patients often have to tell some of their privacy to medical staff, which means that patients should trust medical staff.

This brings a special moral obligation to medical staff: put the interests of patients first and take corresponding actions to make themselves worthy of and safeguard the trust of patients.

Therefore, what characterizes the basic nature of the doctor-patient relationship is the trust model: the trust relationship is based on the patient's special trust in the medical staff, and trusting the latter is based on justice and conscience and sincerely puts the interests of the former first.

Modern medical ethics has two new aspects:

First, due to the development of medical and health undertakings, medicine has developed from a one-to-one personal relationship between doctors and patients to a social undertaking centered on the relationship between doctors and patients.

As a social undertaking, we need to consider the distribution of benefits and burdens, whether the distribution is fair, especially the fair distribution of health resources, and how to make the best use of these resources so that the largest number of people can get the best medical services, which involves health policies, systems and development strategies. This constitutes a new content of medical ethics, that is, public welfare theory.

Secondly, the moral obligation of doctors, or the moral values and beliefs put forward by medical ethics in the past, is absolute and a "supreme command" because their authority is considered to come from sacred religious classics or immortal medical saints. Therefore, these norms or values, whether embodied in codes or cases, are unconditionally applicable to all situations.