A Duty to Protect Our Patients from Physician Sexual Misconduct

In this issue of The Journal, MacIntyre and Appel have reviewed state laws and medical boards' policies to ascertain which states require reporting of sexually exploitive psychiatrists, specifically when the patient reveals the exploitation during treatment. They highlight the competing ethics duties faced by physicians who are in a position to report such conduct and provide guidance for future development of reporting laws to help balance the conflicting ethics principles at stake. In this commentary, I discuss the pros and cons of mandatory reporting laws and underscore the importance of physicians' ethics duty to report the sexual misconduct of other physicians even in the absence of a legal mandate. In light of recent high-profile cases that demonstrate a failure of medicine to self-regulate, I make the case for a cultural shift in our profession so that the subject of reporting physician sexual misconduct is viewed not from the lens of a duty to report, but that of a duty to protect.