I agree, ethical codes protect therapists first. "Do no harm" can take on completely different forms. There is no universal quality of nonmaleficence. What helps one person can harm another, even if the behaviour was based on a concept of nonmaleficence.

As societies become larger and more mobile, healing professionals start to become more distant from their clients/patients, standardisation and regulations starts to occur, and they start to compete for territory with other healing professions. Then we end up with ethical codes...