You may have seen a fascinating video clip that's been making the viral rounds in recent months. It shows a herd of water buffaloes rallying to save one of their own from a gruesome fate at the claws and jaws of a pack of lions. The sight of the rolling black mass of the herd had to be intimidating to the suddenly outnumbered cats.

It's tempting to anthropomorphize courage to these surely mindless beasts. Whatever the motivation, what struck me was that even in the comfort of overwhelming numbers, one of these buffaloes had to be the first to strike out. I wonder what made him or her different from the rest.

Even if you don't waste your time watching YouTube videos, you may have also have heard that the Supreme Court some weeks back issued a ruling in the case of Gonzales v. Carhart that essentially outlaws so-called "partial-birth abortion." Should you care? Whatever your position on the complex, troubling issues around reproductive rights and the sanctity of life, you're darn right you should care.

Every physician, every medical society, every person who cares about the relationship between a caregiver and a patient should care. Because with the stroke of a pen, the divided Court has deemed that licensed, trained practicing physicians are incapable of making difficult medical decisions on their own. That medical schools and professional societies are incapable of training and guiding their members in areas of ethical ambiguity. That adult patients are incapable of facing and making wrenching moral choices about their own medical care. There is no other way to characterize this than a very real, blatant government intrusion into the daily medicine decision-making process of your colleagues, however distant from ophthalmology they may be.

There are many areas of medicine in which consensus does not exist. And in those areas, we trust physicians to rely on their training and their professional ethics to work with their patient to arrive at the decision that represents sound medical care.

Until now.

Every physician, every medical school and every medical society should be responding to this, and loudly. There are established, legitimate methods of arriving at acceptable practices in even the most challenging of medical conundrums. They involve input from and decision-making by those who know the issues best—those who practice the profession.

Even the beasts understand that every member of the herd needs protection.