Advocacy reconsidered: progress and prospects.

Advocacy, a much-prized function of health care professionals, is also a largely unexamined concept. A careful review of physician advocacy reveals and ever-growing number of constraints, such as institutional and governmental cost-control policies, that serve to weaken its credibility. These complications, however, present and opportunity for recasting the carte blanche individualism of traditional advocacy along more socially responsible lines. In our view, the lines of meta-advocacy constitute a suitable moral end for policy formulation.