Towards the new era of medicine

(Piron Guillaume, Unsplash)

This article was exclusively written for The European Sting by Ms. Thaynara Zanineli Stevanato, 23, a third-year medical student at Unicesumar Maringá-
PR. She is affiliated to the International Federation of Medical Students Associations (IFMSA), cordial partner of The Sting. The opinions expressed in this piece belong strictly to the writer and do not necessarily reflect IFMSA’s view on the topic, nor The European Sting’s one.

In the course of time, technology has become more present in our life through electronic devices and smartphones, but the medical area also got invaded by this revolution in the last decades. The code of medical ethics proposed in 1774 and adapted in 1988 (CFM, 1988), which should’ve last forever, is in conflict with this current of telephone consultations and medical media. In this generation, the medical students need a different preparation on the curriculum when compared to previous decades.

Law classes are fundamentally important to alert them the risk of exposing patient cases as propaganda, especially for those who have followed surgical areas. The amount of cases in process per year assigned to plastic surgeons are so expressive that give us a doubt about if have only technology changed, or if the ethical stance of the doctors has changed with it.

Besides this legal and economic impact, we have the so-called “telephone consultations” that demerit the anamnesis and physical examination, that are the pillars for a precise medical diagnosis. This new version of consultation is against the ethical principles of the doctor-patient relationship, besides to corroborate as well for an aggravation of initially simple diseases and the increase of multidrug resistance.

Therefore, we also have the situation of doctors trained in this technological age who sometimes discredit those pillars, probably because they have accommodated themselves with the complementary tests (laboratory and images) which have the ability to even exclude or diagnose a disease, creating a false impression that the traditional tests are obsolete. Medical ethics acts both to know the time to ask for an exam that helps in the diagnosis and when not to do so, avoiding unnecessary expenses to the governmental and private health systems and delaying the patient care.

Now a days the medical student must find the balance between the technology and its action in the medical career. Young people easily get adapted to changes, especially when the situation is observed on the side of the undeniable help that technology has brought to health, but just as the masters of the past, young people have to value the human principles of medicine over facilitation, not because they are told to be done, but because they are the first pillar of this castle called medicine.

And as Oliver Wendell Homes said, “the truth is that medicine, theoretically grounded in observation, is as sensitive to cultural, political, and philosophical influences as a barometer is sensitive to atmospheric changes”. Lastly, medicine must be adaptable to technological advances with the same proportion in medical ethics.

Reference

CFM- Conselho Federal de Medicina. Código de Ética Médica. Resolução CFM n° 1246/88. Rio de Janeiro, Idéia & Produções, 1988. Disponível em: https://portal.cfm.org.br/images/stories/biblioteca/codigo%20de%20etica%20medica.pdf

About the author

Thaynara Zanineli Stevanato, 23, a third-year medical student at Unicesumar Maringá-
PR, a lover of the course and the IFMSA project, I am the founder of the Academic
League of Geriatrics and Gerontology at Unicesumar and currently participate in
Humanizart project, in the future I intend to specialize in cardiology and help the
"hearts" of many patients.