Commentary on the Code of Medical Ethics and Deontology

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article end. The Spanish Medical Association shall review this Code every two years, unless there are new and urgent approaches, adapting and updating it to make it more effective in promoting and development of the ethical principles that should inform professional conduct.

The Code could not fulfil its purposes if it did not remain constantly alert to the changing needs of the internship of Medicine and the new situations created by social and scientific progress. That is why its text closes with this final article declaring it open to such needs and situations. In it, the WTO commits itself to two obligations:

The first is to remain alert and sensitive to the changes occurring within and around it: ways of practising the profession, social impulses, cultural mutations, ethical issues arising from the application of new technologies. The Code must embrace new norms to guide the physician's conduct in the face of new problems. This final article is a vaccine against the ageing or fossilisation of the Code and a stimulus for its permanent update and adaptation.

The second obligation that the WTO imposes on itself is to remain faithful to the perennial ethical principles that must inform professional conduct: respect for the life and dignity of all human beings without exception, the sense of the professional work as a service, the scientific vocation of Medicine, the independence of doctors to decide in conscience what they should do for their patients, and the preservation of confidentiality. These few immutable principles are the guarantee that medicine will always be humane, always scientific. Even if the technical possibilities of the doctor and his control over man's body and soul grow immensely, and even if the laws were to grant him, as is already beginning to happen in some societies, a formidable discretionary power over the life and death of his fellow men, Deontology will continue to protect the doctor both against his own weaknesses and against the temptation to manipulate man; and it will continue to encourage him to serve the sick and the weak with his science and his humanity.