Dual Loyalties and Shifting (Bio)ethical Principles. An Analysis of the Defence Health Board’s Ethical Guidelines and Practices

Since the Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Belmont Report, the military environment has been a testing ground for scientific research and for increasingly urgent ethical debates regarding the multifaceted legal status of various military and non-military physicians and patients. In particular, military medical physicians, who work in complicated situations and environments - ranging from combat to humanitarian zones - could be called upon to make life-changing and potentially controversial decisions with significant bioethical implications. Because this category of health professionals pertains to military institutions, it is positioned along the blurred line between the Hippocratic aspirations and safeguarding of medical practice and the requirements of military culture. From a linguistic perspective, these professionals adhere to military communication and its specific language, genres and means of knowledge dissemination, thus calling discourses of power into play. Therefore, to investigate how the military community defines and disseminates information on the activity of its medical professionals, as well as face possible bioethical conflicts and challenges, the Defense Health Board’s 2015 Ethical Guidelines and Practices for US Military Medical Professionals will be analyzed based on a Critical Discourse Analysis approach sustained by qualitative data, thus underlining the clear contrast between civilian and military communicative patterns, medical practices and founding principles, which reflect military and non-military cultural differences.