Abstract

Commercialization of medicine is a growing trend that threatens to undermine physicians’ commitments to patient care in favor of personal financial interests. Bemoaned by Arnold Relman as early as 1980, growing for-profit sectors of health care have been reshaping medicine from a profession into a business, forming the foundation of what he terms a “medical-industrial complex” that threatens to undermine professional identity and reshape health care funding. Commercialization poses new ethical challenges for health care providers who have a financial stake in their health care decisions and may undermine their fiduciary duties to patients.Certainly, commercialization has brought about new trends in medicine — one need only to look as far as the rise in for-profit hospitals, diagnostic laboratories, and proprietary nursing homes to see how opportunities for financial gain reposition physicians’ orientations vis-à-vis patients.