religion and profession

[cellio]

osewalrus posted an excellent essay on conflicts between religion and one's profession. He and I agree: you are completely free to practice your religion, but if doing so causes complications in your life, you -- not the rest of society -- need to deal with that.

Comments

part 1 of 2

[cellio]

If that same pharmacist was given a prescription by a parent for an obviously lethal dose of a sedative for a mildly retarded child, should the pharmacist refuse it? It's a valid prescription from a valid doctor: can the pharmacist say "no?"

Surely there is a middle position -- how else do pharmacists currently deal with possibly-forged prescriptions and ambiguous cases? It doesn't come up in my field, but if I were told to do something that I thought would be lethal, I'd sure as heck push that issue up my management chain instead of just saying "yah, sure, whatever". I mean, what does a pharmacist do if someone comes in with a prescription and says "I'm also taking $drug and I'm concerned about interactions", and the pharmacist doesn't know whether that's a problem?

Also, you interpret the medical code of ethics incorrectly. If someone calls and requests treatment with morphine for addiction, we as paramedics are not obligated to "treat" them with morphine.

I would have assumed that paramedics aren't allowed to dispense morphine no matter who's asking. Besides, when do patients get to make these kinds of calls?

Deciding when medical care is and isn't appropriate is difficult.

Certainly true.

The [German] situation is exactly analogous to the pharmicist conundrum.

If you're syaing that pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions is exactly analogous to physicians refusing to treat elderly patients, well, that's a little extreme, but I'll agree. If you're trying to say that the pharmacists are analogous to you in that situation, rather than to the negligent doctor, I don't see how.