Medicine and sociology: a parting of the ways

Sociology is a discipline in which sociologists are committed to the pursuit of knowledge but do not have an obligation to implement that knowledge by social action. The medical profession, by contrast, accepts an obligation to implement the knowledge it achieves in practice. This obligation is grounded in the fact that members of the medical profession are (a) the only candidates for the practitioner's role; (b) able to perform the practitioners role best; (c) committed to value appraisal judgments and (d) contractually committed as a profession to implement the findings of research.