by Mario Carini

Created on: August 19, 2009

The doctor's life is never easy. As the population ages and more people come down with serious illnesses, the doctor has less time to see more patients. The health care system is in crisis which adds to the pressure of existing doctors to maintain care and ethical standards when dealing with their patients.

While most doctors do want to live up to the vows of the Hippocratic oath and try to do the best they can, they are forced to look after their own health and welfare.

Most professions are based on providing adequate service and good products if they are to remain in business. A financial counselor would not remain in business long if he consistently fails to handle his customer's money wisely. This holds true for many professions, except for the medical profession. Unfortunately, a doctor can't keep a practice going if he doesn't have any sick customers to attend to. Because he needs ill people, he has a vested interest in insuring that his customer get moderately healthy, but eventually return to be serviced time after time. It's the only profession that is based on sickness rather than health. Even hospitals cannot thrive unless there are patients who need drugs and surgery to stay in profit.

There was a time when doctors were not so overwhelmed that they could make house calls and were genuinely interested in seeing that their patients remained healthy. But those days of Marcus Welby, M.D. are over.

Today's society is fixed on profits and profits are more important than the health of patients. Today's doctor, as stressed as he is, is likely to be amenable for any method that can relieve his work load and provide some peace and joy. Big pharmaceutical companies see the advantage of offering the doctor a vacation, stock options and other incentives that may relieve the doctor from his burden. Of course, that means Big Pharma with its billions of dollar annual profits are quite ready to help the doctor if he pushes the latest breakthrough drugs on his patients.

It's no secret that pharmaceutical company reps regularly visit doctor's offices to leave drug samples and other offers. Often those representatives get priority billing over the lines of patients who wait hours patiently waiting to see their practitioner. The doctor, like everyone else, is human and the temptation to get a vacation to promote an unsafe drug to unsuspecting patients is too hard to ignore regardless of their oath to "do no harm".

While there are doctors such as Julian Whitaker,

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