The healing profession needs healers: the crisis in medical education.

ABSTRACT: In this article, Dean and professor Albert E. Gunn explains that there is something wrong with the medical profession today. The lack of opposition by physicians to current practices that contravene basic human nature is disturbing. Gunn believes an origin of the problem lies in the process of the selection of medical students. Selection has been biased against the very traits that should make a person a good, caring physician. Gunn recommends looking favorably upon, even recruiting, applicants with a broad education in such subjects as history, philosophy, and literature, rather than just basic, technical science knowledge that they are currently being encouraged to study. Applicants should be recruited who are highly educated and able to think for themselves on important issues. Another bias the author has observed is that against applicants who possess a religiously justified morality. Such applicants are asked to justify and defend such a stance. Gunn believes that the fact that applicants who possess these traits are not considered highly desirable, much less preferred, is the basis of the deterioration of the medical profession, and recruiting such independent-minded, ethical, religiously motivated candidates could be the answer to reviving it. Recently, Dr. Richard Seed sought support for the cloning of human beings. It was quite a leap from Dolly, the first cloned sheep. The reaction was immediate, and the news anchors analyzed the controversy with utmost seriousness. National Public Radio (NPR), with its trademark strained news-speak, was right on the case. The consensus seemed to be that it was a bad idea. The President was against it. The only question was, why? The arguments against cloning a human being seemed to boil down to: we're not ready for this. And where were the physicians? Did any physician or medical professional society articulate a clear argument against the cloning of human beings? Dr. Seed could not get any physicians to help him, but instead of a reasoned evaluation of what cloning involves and why it is incompatible with man's nature, the medical profession's reaction was the oft-used aphorism: "Be not the first to accept the new nor the last to reject the old." Since in-vitro fertilization has already created life in the test tube, the line between this and cloning was dim. No physician, nor, for that matter, any pundit or newscaster, could provide a cogent argument one way or the other. Technology was seen as moving too fast, but the medical profession was in the high grass on the specifics. How could it be that the professionals we are most likely to trust are so willing to serve as fellow travelers in redefining human nature down? Why are those whom we depend on to preserve our human nature at the frontline attempting to derogate it? Should they not be somewhere on the line of defense against the ideologues and isms whose concept of the human dimension of existence is so clearly flawed? It is fairly self-evident that people in the media and academia--the knowledge or "new" class--manifest a fundamental skepticism and contempt for religious belief totally out of proportion to that of the society around them. Walker Percy, E. Michael Jones, Amitai Etzione, Paul Johnson, and others have shown that the philosophical fetishes of this new class--from Jean-Paul Sartre to Jean B. L. Foucault--are often elaborate justifications for behavioral and sexual aberration. Members of the medical profession and others of the educated elite have been in the advance guard of some of the most reprehensible crimes of the twentieth century.(1) Let us leave aside the oft-condemned Dr. Mengele. His activities at the end of his life alone show his utter contempt for human life and support all the accusations against him.(2) Take instead the case of an entire country whose policies and attitudes have become a paradigm of the model modern society, Sweden. The United States is constantly compared unfavorably against what is taken as an exemplary public structure (in birth rates, infant mortality, social support systems, etc. …