Vokuv, in
his lecture to my NEURO 300 class, talked about how him and his team looked at
moral judgments in people in people’s lives. He expressed a great interest in
how people have an unconscious difference in judgment after events. He also
looked at the critical areas of the brain, their associated chemicals, and how
they lit up in times of moral judgement. In my opinion his most interesting
application of the science was looking at purely correlation findings of parole
judges giving out reduced sentences or being more willing to grant parole;
after a recess or after lunch.
Although
this matter is not life threatening with new laws are currently being put into
place by the Trump administration, that would make it legal to refuse a patient
treatment on personal moral grounds. While this is currently the case with religious
issues, such as abortion, which gives the doctor the right to refuse to do any
and all abortions for religious reasons, this does not allow doctors to pick
and choose which patients they want to treat. The author of the New York times
article, Can Doctors Refuse to Treat a patient by Dr. Sandeep Jauhar
describes a situation he ran into where a patient needed a new heat valve, his
current one was infected because of his heroin use, and his doctors didn’t want
to give him a new one. Presumably because the effort would be futile, a waste
of their time, and just get infected again because of his ongoing heroin use. The
doctors when to the courts and the decision was made that under current law they
could not refuse him and the surgery went on anyway. Without the surgery the
patient would probably be dead.
Although
Vakuv’s research and findings show that snack breaks help lawyers be more lenient,
this may not be the most useful in asking doctors to take snake breaks
throughout their day. However, there may be some merit to Vakuv’s research and
how it needs to be applied to the medical field especially with a broadening
movement to allow doctors to reject anyone who they deem unworthy of their services.
This could cause many deaths and be a major problem for the healthcare
industry. For example: what if the only doctor covered by your insurance decides
that they do not want to treat you because you are not an enough of an
interesting case or that you smoke and therefore don’t deserve to be treated?
I would
argue that Vakuv’s research needs to be expanded to look at the morality of
doctors specifically. There’s a joke in the United States that to be a doctor you
have to be full of yourself and incredibly smart. These, along with other characteristics
in doctors, often parallel lawyers, and as such I think it would be most imperative
to educated doctors or figure out more ways such that every doctor and lawyer understands
that their action affect another human beings life, not just their track record.
Jauhar, S. (2019, May 13). Can Doctors Refuse to Treat a
Patient? Retrieved December 5, 2019, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/opinion/can-doctors-refuse-patients.html.
Crockett, M. J. (2016). Morphing morals: Neurochemical modulation
of moral judgment and behavior. In S. M. Liao (Ed.), Moral brains: The neuroscience of morality (p. 237–245). Oxford University Press.
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