Conclusion of the week

In conclusion. Compared to the trend in medical humanities led by the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, Taiwan is faced with high-tech developments such as the commercialization of the medical treatment market and genomic medicine, as well as the attempted remolding of ethical governance within a globalized information society.

Under these conditions, Taiwan has had to rely on a reform system of personal moral standards, which was relatively smaller in scope. The key difference was that in the United States interest politics and culture had been in existence for one-hundred years and served as an important model for medical professionalism, but these are unfamiliar to many people, or even professionals. Regarding breakthroughs in the modernization bottleneck Taiwanese society currently faces, the question remains whether government and social reforms and the medical profession will be able to use these realizations to cultivate liberal-thinking leaders with fresh enough visions to initiate a new era, rather than requiring personal moral standards or creating another generation of docile followers by exploitation of feelings that inhibit individual initiative.

Supplementary programs in the US include basic curriculum reforms in humanities and ethics education, from liberal-education-medical-preparatory classes to the development of continuing liberal education for different-level students at medical schools and basic reform of comprehensive coherence in curricula. The focus of the emerging vision for the medical humanities in the United States is on enhancing medical professionalism’s historical perception of the social contract and strengthening medical professionalism’s adherence to the expectations of society from a perspective of art, literature and history. In Taiwan, however, the emerging vision for medical humanities is focused on tremedying deficiencies in liberal education and social medicine in the pre-medical and medical education.

With the rise of new professional culture, the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare Taiwan has been responsible in effective manner. For instance, the regulation of Institutional Review Board and its auditing counterpart has been set up in a very short time period. That makes Taiwan the first Asian country to have an IRB auditing system. In addition, the ethical committee has become a required item for the annual review of a hospital accreditation in Taiwan. In short, it has become a national consensus to foster professional conducts that conform to the bioethical principles in the genomic era. Professionalism as integrated force to the dichotomy between Individual liberalism. And communitarian welfare is evident in the States.

Welfare State Discourses Universal Health Insurance will turn the traditional ideological conflicts between right and left into the new conflicts between the state apparatus and civil society. This is a lesson from Taiwan. Which the Unit State medical professionals could learn. Professionalism is the crucial mediator for participatory democracy in general and ‘Civil economy’ in particular.