He maintained his public, professional stance against assisted suicide, while privately recommending that this patient be allowed to take matters into his own hands. The details of an individual case, he told me, allow for an exception to the rules. Acceptance of professionalism makes physicians different from others who hold themselves out to offer care and treatment. Professions have publicly available codes of ethics. Professions regulate themselves.
Professions create, accept, meet and monitor standards of competency.
Publicly, professionals say that they will hold the good of those they serve to be greater than their own good. Acceptance of medical professional duties and privileges implies acceptance of the medical ethical principles that underlie them. Private actions are not the subject of codes or principles of medical ethics, generally speaking. The obesity management literature demonstrates that physicians who change their own lifestyles spend more time with obese patients and are more often successful at helping those patients change than those physicians who do not. There is overwhelming evidence that increased moderate daily physical activity benefits people, especially older people, by improving balance, increasing walking speed and reducing cardiovascular morbidity and mortality.