Medical Professionalism in Pakistan: Taking Inspiration from the Pakistani Motto

Abstract

Medical professionalism is considered to be a very important component in medical education and embodies a social contract of a doctor to the community he serves. The social contract, as defined by Cruess, is ''a contractual relationship with a series of obligations and expectations based on mutual trust between the society and medicine'' . Each society has different moral and social norms and hence it become rather clear that medical professionalism and its attributes will vary from society to society. Much work has been done in the west to define attributes related to medical professionalism. However,Western frameworks of medical professionalism may not be suited to the cultural values of non-Western countries. It has been brought to attention now that not all the attributes of medical professionalism as defined by West are compatible with the Eastern culture. For example Al-Eraky demonstrated that there is influence of Islamic values and norms in the Arabic society and for that he purposed a 4-gate model of p r o f e s s i o n a l i s m , w h i c h h a d f o u r t h e m e s (domains),that is: dealing with self, dealing with tasks, dealing with others and dealing with God(taqwa and ehtasab) It must be pointed out that not all the Muslim countries demonstrated then domains of faith in Allah and religion as an integral part of professionalism. For an example, thought Turkey is an Islamic State, the attributes lacked the
'faith' discipline in defining professionalism.