Doctors must protect Chen
The Hippocratic Oath is a pledge, called the “Doctor’s Oath” in Chinese, that is taken by doctors and other healthcare professionals, asking them to promise, to the best of their abilities, to practice medicine ethically and honestly. It is not a formal contract, and it is up to each doctor or nurse to live up to the oath as best they can.
It is apparent from photographs in newspapers and on television news that former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), currently serving a long jail sentence, is not in the best of health. Visitors from who have seen Chen have reported back to the media that he looks frail and depressed.
Whatever the legal and correctional system issues that are facing Chen — and he must face these squarely — surely there is room in a warm and humane country like Taiwan for some kind of medical pardon: based not only on humanitarian and medical reasons, but also on the Hippocratic Oath.
The oath’s content: “To keep the sick from harm and injustice,” surely applies to the situation Taiwan is facing in regard to Chen’s health. The doctors looking at the issue of medical parole for Chen should leave politics aside and only focus on the medical aspects of his case.
The Hippocratic Oath is understood by all doctors and now might be the time to jettison politics, put the political issues to one side and focus solely on the medical aspects of Chen’s condition.
If Taiwan’s doctors do this, be they members of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) or the Democratic Progressive Party or just independent voters that support neither party, they can better focus on what needs to be done, and done soon.
Dan Bloom
Chiayi
On March 22, 2023, at the close of their meeting in Moscow, media microphones were allowed to record Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) telling Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, “Right now there are changes — the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years — and we are the ones driving these changes together.” Widely read as Xi’s oath to create a China-Russia-dominated world order, it can be considered a high point for the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea (CRINK) informal alliance, which also included the dictatorships of Venezuela and Cuba. China enables and assists Russia’s war against Ukraine and North Korea’s
After thousands of Taiwanese fans poured into the Tokyo Dome to cheer for Taiwan’s national team in the World Baseball Classic’s (WBC) Pool C games, an image of food and drink waste left at the stadium said to have been left by Taiwanese fans began spreading on social media. The image sparked wide debate, only later to be revealed as an artificially generated image. The image caption claimed that “Taiwanese left trash everywhere after watching the game in Tokyo Dome,” and said that one of the “three bad habits” of Taiwanese is littering. However, a reporter from a Japanese media outlet
Taiwanese pragmatism has long been praised when it comes to addressing Chinese attempts to erase Taiwan from the international stage. “Taipei” and the even more inaccurate and degrading “Chinese Taipei,” imposed titles required to participate in international events, are loathed by Taiwanese. That is why there was huge applause in Taiwan when Japanese public broadcaster NHK referred to the Taiwanese Olympic team as “Taiwan,” instead of “Chinese Taipei” during the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics. What is standard protocol for most nations — calling a national team by the name their country is commonly known by — is impossible for
India is not China, and many of its residents fear it never will be. It is hard to imagine a future in which the subcontinent’s manufacturing dominates the world, its foreign investment shapes nations’ destinies, and the challenge of its economic system forces the West to reshape its own policies and principles. However, that is, apparently, what the US administration fears. Speaking in New Delhi last week, US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau warned that “we will not make the same mistakes with India that we did with China 20 years ago.” Although he claimed the recently agreed framework
RSS