Physicians so often are reminded to respect patient's rights. So often, that in fact some physicians are starting to feel that the public at large has unfairly painted physicians as "professionals without any rights." Of course, physicians have rights, too. I have encountered a lot of physicians who were candid enough to tell me that they don't know how to exercise or invoke those rights. Some also admitted that they don't even know that such rights existed as a matter of law.
This is an interesting question. Indeed,whenever a doctor is talked about, they refer to how skilled they to take acre of patients; mistakes made by doctors are usually not forgotten. When it comes to for example their pay, heavy workload, working at awkward hours, etc, they are reminded of the Hippocratic author-ethics-etc. When a doctor in LMIC is sick due to work related causes, who cares? It is his family. When a politician is sick, the government pays for their treatment in the developed world.
Who will advocate for the rights of doctors? I bate, it is the doctors themselves. Others can only sympathize or lament.
Certainly, patients' rights have been explicited and legalized as a response to what vulnerable people have felt as different ways of abuse. Although it sounds as only one view, when a patient claims to have been abused, physicians can defend themselves proving that it is not true, and in fact in the great majority of cases doctors have not been convicted. Physicians do have duties with patients, but patients also have duties with physicians and with health care institutions, and these duties have not been clearly defined. However, the main issue is that we need GOOD medical doctors, devoted to patients who are in need of help, compassionate and competent physicians.
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