[Dimensions of medical professionalism. Perspectives for the 21st. Century].

Medicine is progressively loosing its prestige and efficacy and needs to rebuild the moral values that maintain the tacit social contract subscribed between doctors and patients. This altruistic commitment to serve people has been devaluated by changes in health systems, by advances in knowledge and by social and economical changes. The perspective with which humanity faces its future, harmed by radical environmental transformations also has contributed to this devaluation. Notwithstanding, requirements to provide high quality health care and demands to reinstall those fundamental attributes of professional work, commit us to introduce or increase the selective learning of those competences to health professionals. This new, or renewed form of improving the teaching of health sciences, seems to be the unique way to stop the reduction on health care professional effectiveness, to maintain quality of care and to accomplish the goal of medical profession to serve and take care of humankind health.