Many, many researchers and physicians these days are finding that their bad behavior results in a particularly awful sentence: ethics training. Boy, you know that is going to solve the problem. It sounds like one of those B-movies about teaching in a high school in gang-ridden east LA: nasty physician glares at tweed-clad ethicist and thinks about how unfair it is that he should have to sit in an ethics class. All he did was disclose somebody’s HIV status to everyone. I mean, who cares, right? There is a way to make being sentenced to ethics more tolerable. Get your boss to let you pick the school. Think Fiji. It looks like their Ministry of Health has it all set so that refresher courses on medical ethics – arranged to punish someone named Waqatakirewa – will be readily available. Wait – can I teach those?

Labels: are there mermaids in fiji?, ethics as punishment, ethics training, rewarding bad behavior