# Should Love be Explicitly Stated as a Core Enabling Concept in the Medical Curriculum?

## TL;DR

This paper argues that love, as a commitment to human dignity, should be taught in medical education to balance modern healthcare's focus on metrics.

## Contribution

The novel proposal is to explicitly define and integrate love as an ethical core concept in medical training.

## Key findings

- Love is framed as a multidimensional ethical commitment encompassing empathy and respect.
- Professional boundaries and reflective practice are essential to prevent love from becoming a narcissistic illusion.
- Humanistic assessment is suggested as an alternative to metrics-driven healthcare models.

## Abstract

The concept of love, defined as a multidimensional ethical commitment to human dignity encompassing empathy, compassion, and respect, should be explicitly integrated into the medical curriculum. This commitment is considered the “secret of quality” (Donabedian) and a necessary counterbalance to the reductive, metrics-driven model of modern healthcare. Acknowledging the risk of love becoming a narcissistic illusion (Lacanian critique), its implementation requires strict professional boundaries, “Self-as-Instrument” training via reflective practice and humanistic assessment over measurable metrics.