A study to select the most unethical variables by medical students in Goa

ABSTRACT The Medical profession is getting to be more and more like any other business profession. This stems from the fact that medical students have to pay a lot of money as fess, especially if the college is not aided by the Government. In an attempt to recover the money spent on education, young doctors tend to indulge in malpractices which result in not practicing the ethics and values of the noble profession. Inorder to find out from the medical students what they consider as most unethical and least unethical, I asked a sample of them to rank five variables in terms of most unethical to least unethical. The five variables were costly drugs, sponsorships, gifts, Government doctors doing private practice and overprescribing. The Thurstone Case V scaling technique was used to find out which variable was most unethical and which was least unethical. Of the five accepting gifts was considered as most unethical, because a gift can range from a simple innocent pen to an expensive car in certain cases. The second variable to be ranked as most unethical was overprescribing which is detrimental to a patient in terms of monetary cost and also in terms of adverse or side effects on account of consuming too many drugs. The Chi square technique was also used wherein the Null hypothesis stated that there was no statistical difference in considering prescribing expensive drugs as most unethical or least unethical. Of the students who say overprescribing was unethical, the number of students in that who consider the prescription of costly drugs as most unethical was nil and less unethical was 100%. The Null hypothesis wais thereby false and it proved that a statistical difference existed in terms of ethics while prescribing costly drugs.