The doctors and nurses involved should flat out be imprisoned for rape. That's what it was. Penetration without consent, explicit or implied (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_consent#First_aid).

I didn't see it mentioned in this writeup, but they did have a search warrant. Sort of.

1. The warrant was only valid within the county. After the first doctor refused, the police took him to a hospital in another county.

2. The warrant had an expiration time on it. The warrant was no longer valid when the colonoscopy was performed.

Regardless of whether they had a warrant, the doctor[s] who performed the procedure should be stripped of their license[s] and prosecuted for fraud, and any nurses or techs involved should be terminated. There's no plausible line of reasoning by which the procedures he was subjected to were medically appropriate or necessary.

But this won't happen because "they were just doing their job" and the medical licensing boards have long since abdicated any pretense of a code of professional conduct. (Witness the doctors sullying their credentials to peddle snake oil supplements and diet aids on late night TV).

Great, they violated a search warrant - criminally - jail is still the place for them.

Should that matter? Doctors have a hippocratic oath to uphold.

This isn't ancient Greece. Of the few medical schools that use the Hippocratic oath, none of them make it mandatory.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted - what you're saying is mostly correct[0] and actually relevant. The Hippocratic oath is very misunderstood and improperly invoked in public discourse.

The Hippocratic oath is the medical equivalent of swearing a judge in on a Bible - symbolically very important, but of next to no literal significance.

For example, I bet most people don't know that the Hippocratic oath says the following:

> I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work[1]

By definition, any surgeon is violating the Hippocratic oath on a daily basis.

There are codes of ethics that doctors are expected to uphold, and the principles behind the Hippocratic oath are still relevant today, but the actual Hippocratic oath is all but obsolete.

I'm sure that the alleged actions of the doctors question violated whichever code of ethics they are bound to, but we should be discussing those instead, not the Hippocratic oath - if there is any possibility of their license being revoked, those codes are the bar against which their actions will be measured.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_oath#Modern_use_an... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_oath#English_trans...