Recovering medicine as a scientific and humanist profession

There is an urgent need, tit our society, to recover the real meaning of medicine as a complex of science and humanistic values committed to person's health care. Following the initiative of the American Board of Internal Medicine, the American College of Physicians and the American Society of Internal Medicine (ACP-ASIM) and the European Federation of Internal Medicine, the Medical Professionalism Project has launched a comprehensive declaration to rephrase the social contract between medicine and the society, emphasising The principles and responsibilities that must orient the thoughts and actions of the good physician. The importance, soundness and opportunity of this chart, stimulates an ample dissemination of these concepts and to incorporate them as moral assets, integrating the quality, as experts on a scientific discipline, with the humanistic values provided in These era of increasing bioethical demands (Rev Med Chile 2003, 131: 454-5).