PEDIATRICS Vol. 60 No. 6 December 1977, pp. 863
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CRITICISM'S EASY-TO BE RIGHT IS DIFFICULT

Burton Bledstein and Student

Perhaps never before within the last century have we as Americans been so aware of the arrogance, shallowness, and potential abuses of the vertical vision by venal individuals who justify their special treatment and betray society's trust by invoking professional privilege, confidence, and secrecy. The question for Americans is, How does society make professional behavior accountable to the public without curtailing the independence upon which creative skills and the imaginative use of knowledge depend? The culture of professionalism has allowed Americans to achieve educated expressions of freedom and self-realization, yet it has also allowed them to perfect educated techniques of fraudulence and deceit. In medicine, law, education, business, government, the ministry—all the proliferating services middle-class Americans thrive on—who shall draw the fine line between competent services and corruption?