The Limits and Obligations of Fidelity: Resource Use

Abstract

Physicians, it would seem, are trapped between the proverbial rock and hard place. On the one hand, traditional fidelity requires them to promote their patients’ best interests, including to use whatever resources are necessary for good medical care. On the other hand, they have lost much of their accustomed control over those resources. Similarly, traditional fidelity requires the physician to place the patient’s interests above his own. And yet, as we have seen, the physician now must sometimes pay a serious personal price for doing so. As the physician exercises clinical authority over resources owned by others, those ‘others’ influence clinical decisions by placing the physician’s own interests in jeopardy.