Foro 2

tica profesional
Bryam Briceno

Ethical scenario #1

A newly graduated dentist who is pretty desperate and does

not have any plan to start working on his own is offered to
work for a private social foundation with a nice salary per
month for a newly graduated dentist. These private social
foundations usually use misleading advertising and do not
respect the established prices by the colegio de cirujanos
dentistas de Costa Rica, most of the materials they work with
are considered as bad quality by the dental industry.

The dentist faces a dilemma here, if he accepts this job he will

be participating in unfair competition. He also would be
offering their patients treatments with bad quality materials
that may cause failures and possible damages to the patient.
The patient is going to have complains about dentist and not
with the foundation. The patient can even sue him, so the
reputation of the dentist may stain and the foundation would
not care about it.

Should he take the job knowing how these private social

foundation works? At the end he realizes that even when he is
desperate than his values and principles are way stronger that
getting a nice salary with possible damage to the society and
his mates (dental professionals) so he rejects the job.
Ethical scenario #2

I have not had any patient in the last few days. Finally a
patient comes into my dental office referring a really bad tooth
pain that she cannot take any more. While I do the clinical and
radiographic diagnostic I see the tooth is broken and he is
pretty close to some tissues that could complicate the
treatment. Should I do the treatment and get a big amount of
money from the surgery, especially now that I havent had
luck with patients or should refer the patients to a specialist?
If I cannot deal with a treatment I have to do an extra effort to
get someone who is capable of treating his condition. I decide
to refer the patient to a specialist since my principles of the
well being of my patients is more important that a
compensation or convenience.