ABSTRACT
Medicine is first and foremost a relationship. It is the coming together of one individual, the patient, who is ill or has specific needs and a second individual, the physician, whose goal is to help the patient and who possesses a unique set of knowledge and skills to pursue that goal. Because medicine is fundamentally a relationship, it is at heart an ethical endeavor. Physicians have a long history of creating codes or oaths to provide the ethical norms and framework to support and protect the underlying relationship. Medical ethics consists of a set of principles and systematic methods that attempt to guide physicians on how they ought to act in their relationships with patients and others. These principles and methods are based on moral values shared by both the lay society (may vary from culture to culture) and the medical profession.
