Commentary

Throughout COVID, in my resistance to the vaccine mandates, I often said some version of this: Doctors took the Hippocratic Oath. How can they support policies that cause harm? I said it confidently and repeatedly, and I believed it. In my mind there was a single, standardized, binding promise that every physician made before being licensed: first, do no harm. It felt like a fixed moral anchor, something solid I could point to when I felt the medical establishment was drifting.

The truth is, I had never actually examined what that oath is, who takes it, or whether it even means what I thought it meant. I was repeating something I had heard. Recently, in a candid conversation, I asked a physician why so many doctors seemed to move in lockstep during COVID. She laughed and jokingly said, “Because we’re all part of a pagan death cult. We swear to the Greek gods in unison as a chant at graduation.”

I remember thinking, that cannot possibly be true.

In some ways, it isn’t. In other ways, it’s not entirely false.

There is no single, standardized Hippocratic Oath in the United States. There is no federally mandated wording, no universal pledge tied to state licensure. Medical schools choose what oath, if any, their graduates recite. Some use a modern adaptation. Some use the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Geneva, written after World War II. Some classes rewrite their oath every year. Some students draft their own. A few schools still use a version close to the classical text attributed to Hippocrates, written roughly 2,500 years ago.

That original version begins by invoking Greek deities: “I swear by Apollo the physician, by Asclepius, by Hygieia, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses …” In the ancient world, swearing by the gods was how solemn promises were made. It was the legal and spiritual language of the time. But what unsettled me was not the history. It was realizing that this ceremony, whatever version is used, is not connected to licensure. A doctor can graduate, pass the boards, obtain a state license, and practice medicine regardless of the specific wording recited at graduation. There is no legal requirement that they promise to do no harm in any standardized form.

Even the phrase “first, do no harm” is not written that way in the original oath. It is a later summary of an ethical principle, not a line every physician formally swears.

As someone who has grown increasingly skeptical of centralized medical authority, that matters to me. I make much of my own medicine. I rely on food, sunlight, soil, and the body’s capacity to heal. I use Western medicine as emergency medicine because it is excellent at trauma, surgery, and acute crisis. But I do not look to it for chronic metabolic illness. Over the years I have shifted from outsourcing my health to institutions to reclaiming responsibility for it, and that shift has forced me to look more closely at the foundations of the system itself.

When I realized there is no universal ethical vow binding physicians together under one shared, unchanging promise, I found that disconcerting.

I went looking for data on what percentage of medical schools still use the classical oath with the invocation of Greek gods and could not find a clear, centralized answer. Surveys suggest most schools administer some form of oath, but the wording varies widely. Many have secularized it. Some revise it annually.

The classical invocation appears in a minority of ceremonies, often for historical continuity rather than religious intent. There is no single standard. And it is easy to dismiss the symbolism of that classic oath. Modern graduates are not secretly participating in pagan worship.

And yet when a room full of future physicians stands together and recites an ancient incantation invoking deities historically associated with both healing and plague, it does raise a symbolic question. Apollo, in Greek mythology, was associated with medicine but also with sending pestilence. Power over life and death, healing and harm, was wrapped into the same figure. The ancient world understood medicine as something potent and dangerous.

When we look at our modern system, so dependent on pharmaceutical interventions that may relieve symptoms while also carrying significant side effects, it is hard not to notice the parallel. We live in an era where medicine can save your life in one moment and burden your body in the next. It is both healer and poisoner. The Hippocratic Oath reminded physicians through the ages to wield that power for good.

If there is no real oath that binds all physicians together in a clear and unchanging commitment to do no harm, it becomes easier to see how doctors, like all humans, can be swept up in institutional momentum.

During COVID we watched tribal behavior unfold across nearly every sector of society. Medicine was not immune. This is not unique to doctors. It is human nature to follow the tribe, especially under pressure.

But physicians occupy a sacred space in our culture. They are entrusted with blood, with breath, with birth, with death. They stand at the threshold moments of human existence.

Because of that, I believe it matters that they give their word to something greater than themselves. I am not insisting every doctor swear on the Bible. We live in a pluralistic nation. But I do believe that when a human being publicly gives their word, they are more likely to feel the weight of that promise. There should be a clear and unequivocal commitment that the patient comes first and that harm is never justified by convenience, conformity, or institutional pressure.

An oath alone cannot prevent corruption, fear, or group think. But the absence of a shared and unchanging commitment makes drift easier.

I no longer casually say, “They took the Hippocratic Oath,” as if it were a universal contract carved in stone. I was wrong about that. What I was really appealing to was not a specific ancient text, but the expectation that healers should be bound by something higher than policy.

If trust in medicine is to be restored, perhaps we should begin by asking what promise, exactly, binds those who practice it, and whether that promise is strong enough to withstand the next crisis.

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