To Restore Trust, Doctors Need to Re-commit to the Oath of Hippocrates, according to the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons
GlobeNewswire | Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
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TUCSON, Ariz., March 10, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The medical profession has traded its birthright for a mess of pottage called evidence-based medicine, writes Stephen Hughes, M.D., in the spring issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Hughes is a resident physician in internal medicine and pediatrics in South Carolina.
At the time the Hippocratic Oath was first penned and sworn, it represented “a definitive break with the surrounding culture and values of the medical establishment,” Dr. Hughes states. “It is a call to reform, with the fundamental recognition that the purpose of medicine is ‘to help the sick.’”
“If followed generally, these precepts would have prevented much of the chaos of the COVID crisis, in which physicians refused to see the sick in their clinics and instead abandoned them to the emergency departments, blindly followed sham guidelines, ignored safe and effective early treatments borne out by clinical experience, and supported draconian and unethical requirements for mass COVID ‘vaccination.’ The loss of society’s trust is a self-inflicted wound,” he writes.
Dr. Hughes reminds us that medical experimentation, abortion, euthanasia, and sexual coercion are all specifically named and prohibited by the Oath. Those vices that characterized medicine in the time of Hippocrates have emerged again as “the defiling blemishes of our age,” he observes.
The Oath of Hippocrates lays out, in timeless form, a vision of medicine bounded by a set of moral commitments pledged to each of the physician’s patients. Hippocratic physicians took their Oath at the beginning of their training, “Successfully restoring morals and professionalism to medicine necessitates the successful transfer of Hippocratic medicine to the next generation of future physicians,” he concludes.
Stuff the Bus Foundation founder Tony Rose (left), hands Foundation President Kyle Wolz a box of donated school supplies Saturday during the annual Stuff the Bus event at Crossroads Express in 2022.
