There may be unethical disclosure of a patient's medical history to employers, credit investigators, banks, attorneys and others; and sexual contact may be initiated by the practitioner with his or her patients. Practitioners may accept bribes or excessive fees for expert testimony, and they may make narcotics and other substances that can be misused available to those in their care. They may perform illegal abortions or treat unreported gunshot wounds. The problems of ageing and incurable terminal conditions and diseases are susceptible to medical fraud. Ineffectual cures may be offered for everything from cancer to …show more content…
As part of this protective process, every effort tends to be made to ignore, criticize and marginalize alternative approaches to healing, even when they have been successfully practised for centuries in other cultures. To this end legal sanction against the investigation, teaching or use of such approaches, or the certification of its practitioners, may be sought by exploiting the privileged institutional position the profession enjoys. This may even indirect support for media campaigns through which alternative practices are systematically denigrated. Typically the profession has exhibited extreme resistance to such techniques as acupuncture and the use of certain herbal medicines (from which subsequently key chemicals are extracted for use in high priced pharmaceutical products). There is inability to distinguish between cultivation of healing skills and the defence, at whatever cost, of the social and economic interests of the