A New Hippocratic Oath Asks Doctors To Fight Racial Injustice And Misinformation

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Healthcare professionals gather outside Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis to demonstrate in support of the Black Lives Matter movement on June 5. The demonstration, called ‘White Coats for Black Lives,’ was organized to show solidarity with those protesting the death of George Floyd after being restrained by Minneapolis police officers on May 25.

Jeff Roberson/AP

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Jeff Roberson/AP

A group of first-year medical students at the University of Pittsburg worked together on Zoom to craft a new version of the ancient Hippocratic Oath.

University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

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University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

The earliest known version of the Hippocratic Oath dates back to the 5th Century BC. Many iterations exist, and in many U.S. medical schools it’s become customary for incoming medical students to write and even recite their own versions; many of the variants include language that prohibits discrimination or bias in the practice of medicine.

What’s distinctive about the Pittsburg version is that it specifically names people who have died recently at the hands of police, and thereby addresses events that are still unfolding.

«Our oath can be both timely and timeless,» says Sweat.

Increasingly, medical professionals are joining protests for racial justice and acknowledging racism’s impact on public health. For example, Black residents of Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, have been disproportionately hurt by the coronavirus, like Blacks in other parts of the U.S. Though just 13 percent of Allegheny County is Black, Black residents comprise nearly 19 percent of cases and 30 percent of COVID-19 hospitalizations.

«This pandemic has wreaked havoc on minority populations,» says Sweat. «It has revealed the many gaps within the medical field…a lot of those gaps that this pandemic has revealed, those are things we need to go after to fix.»

Bioethicist Laura Guidry-Grimes agrees this year has been a «paradigm shifting time» which has brought a «reckoning» for medicine, and therefore she likes that the Pittsburg version of the Hippocratic oath discusses COVID-19.

«[It acknowledges] that we have been challenged and learned the hard way…that what we’ve been doing is not enough,» says Guidry-Grimes, an assistant professor in the Department of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Arkansas.

The new oath asks physicians to eliminate their personal biases, combat disinformation to improve health literacy and be an ally to minorities and other underserved groups in society.

Sean Sweat, a first-year medical student at the University of Pittsburg School of Medicine, was part of a group of students who wrote a new version of the Hippocratic Oath for physicians.

Anna Li

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Anna Li

It also calls on doctors to learn about the social determinants of health «in order to use my voice as a physician to advocate for a more equitable health care system from the local to the global level.»

But some worry that the proliferation of different versions of physician oaths could weaken their intended effect on the profession. A 2004 paper in Academic Medicine suggested that the trend might even lead to «fragmentation and confusion about the ethical values of the medical profession.»

But Guidry-Grimes thinks that concern is misplaced. If anything, she worries that physician oaths have lost relevance: «My fear is that too often that the oath taking is a ritual for the sake of ritual. You have words washing over everything without meaning or impact.» If that is the case, exercises such as rewriting the oaths are helpful, in that they may spur medical students to more deeply consider professional ethics and their sense of mission.

For Sweat, the oath she helped write has meaning, and will continue to guide her as she launches her career. «Patients entrust us to take care of their health,» she says. «In my opinion we’re more than just physicians. We’re leaders in this society. With that comes a responsibility.»