This means, for example, speaking out and acting against practices that harm people's health, that deny poor or disenfranchised groups access to health care, and that perpetuate discrimination. It also means supporting colleagues who are subject to human rights violations. Paradoxically, the erosion of autonomy in the era of managed care may encourage the emergence of such an ethic. On the one hand, physicians struggling with increasing corporate control over medicine may experience intrusions into their medical decisions that could result in human rights violations. Although managed care's economically motivated interference with clinical judgment is not the same as governmental or politically motivated interference, the thread connecting them is clear.
Physicians can contribute enormously to protecting human rights.
Consider, for example, the role of physicians in the struggle against landmines. Those ethics would call for treating victims, especially in an emergency, but they do not obligate physicians to join the effort to eliminate the weapon. An ethic based on human rights, however, views the elimination of landmines as a means of protecting the health of millions of people. Physicians have exercised consistent leadership in seeking to ban the weapon. Many professional societies, including the American Medical Association, have taken a tough stand to ban landmines.