A Critical Approach to the Corruption and Deterioration of Medical Ethics as Reflected in Robin Cook’s Coma and Arthur Hailey’s Strong Medicine

Abstract

Medicine and healthcare are the most obligatory and indispensable elements to improve our lives. By the process of prevention, diagnosis and treatment, it has been the life saviour for years. With technological advancement and improvement in science, face of medicine and Medicare facilities have progressed to higher level of excellence along with increasing number of healthcare providers and medical administrators. Increasing marketization and competitions promoted healthcare organizations to concentrate more on benefits. Unfortunately, medical ethics in business as well as professional level is getting corrupted day by day. When financial viability becomes a necessity, ethical dilemmas become a common phenomenon. Even though such dilemmas have been addressed by the law, many black market and profit seeking organizations are working with profit motive, including hospitals and pharmaceutical companies who treat patients as mere guinea pigs. Through the view of declining medical ethics and increasing criminology, the article mainly focuses on the relationship between patients and the professionals who provide them healthcare facilities with the help of books as primary material. Coma (1977) by Robin Cook and Strong Medicine (1984) by Arthur Hailey tend to uncover the illegal scams that revolve around the medical field.