The World Medical Association’s revised International Code of Medical Ethics offers a core set of ethical norms for all doctors worldwide to follow, write Ramin W Parsa-Parsi , Raanan Gillon , and Urban Wiesing
Increasing global mobility, and the growing plurality in society that comes with it, has an undeniable effect on medical practice. The likelihood of patients consulting doctors with different cultural backgrounds, religions, or secular values has increased substantially. This raises several essential questions for the medical profession around whether patients can expect a core set of ethical norms from all doctors regardless of their location, backgrounds, and beliefs or whether patients have to accept that ethical norms will differ depending on where they are in the world. We firmly believe that the medical profession across the world needs common answers to such questions and that there should be (and is) a core set of ethical norms for the world’s doctors.
The World Medical Association (WMA) was founded after the second world war largely to re-establish trust in the medical profession by re-affirming that there were some norms of medical practice that must apply to all doctors globally. The WMA Declaration of Geneva1—also known as the physician’s pledge and …