Medical professionalism requires that the best interest of the patient must always come first: YES

Patient welfare has been central to every declaration of medical professionalism and medical ethics from the oath of Hippocrates to the recent Physicians’ Charter.1,2 The latter is a combined statement from the European Federation of Internal Medicine, American College of Physicians, American Society of Internal Medicine, and American Board of Internal Medicine. It reaffirms the fundamental principles that physicians’ professionalism lies in ‘placing the interests of patients above those of the physician, setting and maintaining standards of competence and integrity, and providing expert advice to society on matters of health’.The continual need to re-state the ‘universal truth’ of patient centrality can only be because current practice is seen to fall short of ideal, and principles need re-interpretation to be relevant in an increasingly complex and changing world.