Where the question came from

First, do no harm. Help has a cost.

The question is older than medicine as a profession.

In the fifth and fourth centuries before the common era, the Hippocratic tradition gave the first lasting answer in the western record. The body has its own power to heal. The physician’s job is to support that power, not to override it. And first, do no harm.

That sentence is precise. Help itself has a cost. The cost has to be weighed against what the help is meant to fix.

The tradition watched the body closely. It let the body’s own workings do most of the work. The physician stepped in at the level needed, and not above it.

Then the readings changed. The seventeenth century saw the body as clockwork: pumps, valves and levers, to be diagnosed and repaired. The late nineteenth century saw disease as an invasion: bacteria and viruses, to be found and killed. The mid-twentieth century saw illness in the molecules: genes, proteins, chemical pathways.

Each turn saw finer detail. None of them replaced the question. Where does the help begin, and what does it do?

In 1979 the question took the form most of the world still uses. Four principles. Autonomy: the body belongs to the person who lives in it. Beneficence: the doctor should help. Non-maleficence: the doctor should not harm. Justice: medical resources should be shared fairly. For more than four decades these four have been the working language of medical ethics.

They capture real things. But they are not derived from a ground. They are stipulated: set down, not shown. This chapter derives all four from the axiom of the 420 Code, one record exists. And it derives one thing more that the four do not name.

Source. Ø Applications, Chapter 5 — Medicine and the Viability Corridor. The book in full: the420code.org/Applications.pdf. The short edition: the420code.org/models/applications/05-medicine-and-the-viability-corridor/. The film, Level one was never attempted: the420code.org/films/applications/. Its kill switches: APP-5.1 to APP-5.5.