An Analysis Of Glenn Mcgee's 'Salt In The Wound'

1028 Words3 Pages

Ghida Al Kharfan
Mrs. Nina Shalhoub
English 204- Section ll
15 March 2016

A Critique/Synthesis of the following articles: “Salt in the wound: Will India rise up against the oppression of foreign clinical trials” by Glenn McGee and “Call to Check ‘Unethical’ Drug Trials in India” by Rahul Verma.
In his article “Salt in the wound: Will India rise up against the oppression of foreign clinical trials” written in April 2006, Glenn McGee, the director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical College, argues that the abuse of the poor people in India by western pharmaceutical industries approaches a kind of “imperialism”. Moreover, Rahul Verma, in his article “Call to Check ‘Unethical’ Drug Trials in India” written in 9 February 2004, …show more content…

He claims that such trials are creating a business that aims at supporting pharmaceutical companies in other countries. Furthermore, the number of people willing to enroll in India exceeds the one in the United States where the cost of the trials is double that of India. McGee argues that the illiterate Indian population doesn’t distinguish between good and bad trials, and that only few hospitals are being able to conduct adequate clinical trials. Then he describes how crowds in the clinics are mainly created by poor Indian people, since one clinical trial’s cost reaches up to three months’ income. Finally, he brings up the government’s wills to check the safety of the trials before testing them on people and the failure of the whole process after one year because of the increased number of trials. McGee ends his article by wondering whether the Indian nation will ever be able to defeat the new imperialism or …show more content…

For instance, in the fifth paragraph of his article, he said (2006): “200 of the 14 000 general hospitals in India are capable of conducting clinical trials adequately”, and in his seventh paragraph he said: “435 women were given an anticancer drug to treat fertility, but did not know the drug was not cleared for this use”. By presenting such statistics and facts, McGee could strengthen his point of view and back up his arguments, making it easier for the readers to understand his position and be convinced of his thoughts towards clinical trials. He was argumentative, informative and persuasive at the same time, to explain first for the readers the truth behind the clinical trials and to encourage them not to enroll in such doings afterwards. However, McGee seemed a bit contradictory in his article. He talked about clinical trials being behind a new imperialism, a new oppressive authority. So, for a charge of imperialism to be appropriate in this case, he should have shown more evidences about pharmaceutical companies behaving oppressively, rather than focusing on the discounts that they are winning and on the ignorance of poor Indian people about the consequences of clinical trials. As a result, the author was successful in showing the negative aspects of the clinical trials and in warning people about an

Open Document