Written in ancient Greece around 400 BC (scholars date it to the late 5th or the 4th century BC). What the oath declares, set beside the medicine of today.

1. Treat the sick with diet and way of living — the only treatment the oath names. Use regimen (food, exercise, sleep, daily habits) to help patients.
   Today: Nutrition research gets less than 5% of the United States National Institutes of Health budget (4.1% in 2023 by the agency’s own count, down from 4.9% in 2019) — roughly 2% of what the United States drug industry spends on research. Nutrition and lifestyle medicine also gets little time in medical training, and is used and recommended far less often than patented medicine.
2. Protect patients from harm and injustice.
   Today: Patient safety, avoiding needless tests and drugs, and treating every patient fairly.
3. Never give a deadly drug, even when asked — nor suggest one.
   Today: The oath’s line is cited in the debate over assisted dying, which some countries now permit.
4. Live and practise with integrity. Keep your own life and your work clean and honest.
   Today: Professional ethics and personal conduct.
5. Know your limits and refer what you aren’t trained for. The oath says leave cutting for bladder stones to those who do that work.
   Today: Referral to a specialist.
6. Keep what you see and hear private. This covers anything learned in treatment, and even outside it.
   Today: Medical confidentiality and patient privacy — in the United States, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996.
7. The oath closes with a pledge: honour and a good life if kept, the opposite if broken.
   Today: Medical licensing — a licence can be revoked for misconduct. Medical schools that still swear an oath mostly use a modern version, such as the Declaration of Geneva (1948, last revised 2017); the original wording is almost never used.
8. “As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least to do no harm.” From Epidemics, a companion Hippocratic text, not the Hippocratic Oath.
   Today: The saying “First, do no harm” (in Latin, Primum non nocere), taught to medical and pharmacology students; the Latin phrase is first recorded in the 1800s.

Read and summarized by artificial intelligence into plain-language articles you can check against the original studies.

The 32 our readers open most. Press play and watch a part of the body work — then break it on purpose and see what changes, with sound and live readouts in real clinical units.