A doctor who likes Ayn Rand. Hypocrite! You’re all for individual freedom UNTIL someone who doesn’t have an MD wants to practice “medicine,” then you snivel to the government and demand regulation.

My impression is that there were some valid observations in Ayn Rand, but she approaches an argument that the ultimate value of a human being is what they can make, take and accumulate. While it is the prerogative of capital (in all its forms) to preserve itself and to accumulate, I doubt that even the most successful conqueror would point to their “selfishness” as a raison d’etre.

I prefer the enlightened self-interest that would dictate to care for your fellow human being, before they become a mob… remember Marie Antoinette.

This is what concerns me as well. But I am also afraid that it has already happened.

As for Rand…I find snippets of quotations from her much easier to digest, and I don’t apologize for disliking “Atlas Shrugged”. It is a lumbering beast of a novel that begs to be misunderstood by sacrificing clarity for overlong, muddy rhetoric. The ideas are worth examining, but it is not a well-written book.

I also think that any study of this novel should immediately be followed by reading Steinbeck’s for more eloquent “The Grapes of Wrath”, wherein the Joad family learns that survival may actually depend on reaching out.

Can anyone arrange for me to talk with my friend at Lemuel Shattuck Hospital Geriatric Care Services?

This is a matter of the most immediate concern!

I’m trying to telephone an old friend of mine at Lemuel Shattuck Hospital Geriatric Care Services. There are too many obstacles for getting in touch with patients and for patients getting in touch with friends and family.

Please look into and advocate for having more accessible telephones available so that Lemuel Shattuck Hospital Geriatric Care Services patients are not so isolated from friends and family. The further risk with difficulties to recovery by people this isolated from telephone communications is a matter of great concern. Having people in closer touch with those they care about shortens recovery, motivates. A community health issue — this current level of relatively isolated people at the Geriatric Care Services!

Hippocratic ethics does not require that one sacrifice ones own interests to help whoever needs it.

They do require that once one has accepted a doctor patient relationship, whether for a fee or a personal choice to extend charity or motivated by some other felt obligation or belief, then to that person the physician is ethically bound to sacrifice his own interest in certain respects: to recommend care based what is in the patients interests and not his own, and to keep the patients confidences regardless of his own self-interest.

So even objectivist thinking, properly considered, is not inconsistent with ethical medical practice.

The human heart being full of every sort of sin, I imagine some medical students will shame the entire enterprise by using it to to justify suplanting medical ethics with business ethics. Run a business with objectives of maximizing sales rather than optimizing care, giving customers what they want instead of telling patients “no” when what they want is bad for them.

But the objectivists have no way of guarding against that, not even recognizing sin, as they are athiests. That is my concern.

Better to teach medical students traditional ethics, ground it into them body and soul. Beat them down and wear them out like capitalists in a commie reeducation camp until Hippocratic ethics can be woven into their formaldehype impregnated DNA. But to leave their basic philosophy of life untouched, as whether Christian, Objectivist, Muslim, or Jew, it is all compatible with medical ethics. I do have some concern about collectivist ethics as Hippocratic ethics are individualistic, but that is for another debate. In fact the only real value I see to Rand’s rants, is that they give the athiest something to stand on in resisting the intellectual tyranny of communists and fellow-traveling socialists.

From The Virtue of Selfishness:
“Just as a man cannot survive by any random means, but must discover and practice the principles which his survival requires, so man’s self-interest cannot be determined by blind desires or random whims, but must be discovered and achieved by the guidance of rational principles. This is why the Objectivist ethics is a morality of rational self-interest – or of rational selfishness.”

While we’re on the topic, I think the definition of the word “selfishness” needs some clarification.

Also from The Virtue of Selfishness:

“The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong; it represents a devastating intellectual “package-deal” which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

“In popular usage, the word ’selfishness’ is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.

“Yet the exact meaning and the dictionary definition of the word ’selfishness’ is: concern for one’s own self interests..”

And finally…

“Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egoist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge, or act. Those are functions of the self”

Regardless of whether you agree or disagree, I think we can at do her the courtesy of discussing her on her own terms.