Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to Econ Talk. in to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done

going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econ talk.org we'd love to hear from you. Today is July 29, 2024.

My guest is physician Adam Seifu, professor of medicine at the University of Chicago.

His blog on Substack is Sensible Medicine.

This is his third appearance on the program.

He was last here in July of 2019 talking about the case

for being a medical conservative. Adam, welcome back to Econ Talk. Thank you so much,

Russ. It's great to be here. Our topic for today is the day-to-day life of

being a doctor. We're going to use some of the essays you've written at

your blog, Sensible Medicine that are really quite wonderful that reveal the challenges and

rewards of the career you've chosen. Let's start with the declaration of Geneva, something I had never heard of.

I don't, you don't mention how old it is.

What is it? Right, I'm afraid, I don't know. It was interesting. I wrote this essay thinking about a pledge that I assume is part of what doctors take or as part of our career which is that we treat all of our patients equally.

And I assumed it was in the Hippocratic Oath and so I ended up taking this deep dive into the

Hippocratic Oath the original which has become quite politically incorrect

and all the new versions of the Hippocratic Oath and that pledge doesn't appear anywhere

in the Hippocratic Oath and so I finally found this declaration of Geneva which has been

adopted by I think about half the medical students as

their at medical schools as their pledge that their graduates take and

that declaration does in fact include that you will take care of your patients irrespective of you

know wealth creed color sexual orientation anything else and so I was like okay

...