Imagine going to the doctor to get checked because you feel sick and they tell you that you need treatment. You think that the doctors are doing is giving you treatment for your sickness, you wake up the next day and you find out that the doctors took a part out of your body without your permission. Would you consider these actions right or would you consider it unethical for doctors to do this without you knowing. Is it ethical to enroll subjects in research when they are not capable of giving free and fully informed consent?. In this essay I will be talking about what informed consent is, and why it is so important in medical research. I will explain the rights it provides to the patients, and why it has been required in health society. …show more content…
I will include information from the book The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks and the primary source "Fifty years later: The Significance of the Nuremberg Code", along with eight other sources. Informed Consent is letting the patient or research subject know exactly what the doctors are going to do, and the dangers of the process. "Patients fill out a general consent form when they are admitted or receive treatment from a healthcare institution." (Jessica De Bord). What De Bord means by this, is that patients have to fill out a form to give doctors permission to receive treatment, and participate in the study. Informed Consent provides the patient the right to decide whether they want to accept or refuse treatment. Patients also have the right to end their participation at any time during the treatment. According to Stanny Kass' article titled "Informed Consent Outline", the patient must be competent to enter a legal agreement to give informed consent. Patients must be at least 18 years of age, and must not be considered legally incompetent. A patient that is legally considered incompetent is someone who has a mental illness …show more content…
The Nuremberg Code was brought about when Nazi doctors were performing experiments on prisoners without them agreeing to participate in it. The Nuremberg Code was first brought about during the case for the Nazi doctors that performed experiments on prisoners without them agreeing to participate. I used the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks written by Rebecca Skloot, I also used the primary source "Fifty years later: The Significance of the Nuremberg Code" written by Evelyne Shuster, along with eight other sources. In my opinion, if the Nuremberg Code was a law, then there wouldn't be anymore problems with patients not being
Those who were affected by the testing in hospitals, prisons, and mental health institutions were the patients/inmates as well as their families, Henrietta Lacks, the doctors performing the research and procedures, the actual institutions in which research was being held, and the human/health sciences field as a whole. Many ethical principles can be applied to these dilemmas: Reliance on Scientific Knowledge (1.01), Boundaries of Competence (1.02), Integrity (1.04), Professional and Scientific Relationships (1.05), Exploitative Relationships (1.07, a), Responsibility (2.02), Rights and Prerogatives of Clients (2.05), Maintaining Confidentiality (2.06), Maintaining Records (2.07), Disclosures (2.08), Treatment/Intervention Efficacy (2.09), Involving Clients in Planning and Consent (4.02), Promoting an Ethical Culture (7.01), Ethical Violations by Others and Risk of Harm (7.02), Avoiding False or Deceptive Statements (8.01), Conforming with Laws and Regulations (9.01), Characteristics of Responsible Research (9.02), Informed Consent (9.03), and Using Confidential Information for Didactic or Instructive Purposes (9.04), and Debriefing (9.05). These particular dilemmas were not really handled until much later when laws were passed that regulated the way human subjects could be used for research. Patients
Furthermore, these doctors had no legal or ethical codes to conduct experimentations or research on African Americans. For example, during 1998, “172 employees, all but one of them black, sued Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory when they learned that they had secretly been tested for syphilis, pregnancy, and sickle-cell trait without their knowledge that the blood and urine they had supplied during required physical examinations would be tested…” (314). This indicates that there was no consent from these blacks and scientists where secretively testing immunities for sickle-cell on them without any permission whatsoever. The release of this experiment was against the Americans with Disabilities Act and these researchers had no right to release information without the patient’s consent. Furthermore, experiments that had no patient’s consent varied from blisters “to see how deep black skin went” to threatening surgeries, sterilization, inoculations, and not tested pharmaceuticals (54). Without consent, all experiments are considered as unethical. A patient’s consent is important because it is huge determination of privacy and respecting the patient’s wishes. Without any consent, it is indicating that patient’s do not have rights about their own privacy, which was against the law during colonial times and in present days. Some ethical guidelines include the right to withdraw from the study
To begin, the ownership of the tissue should belong to the person until removed from the body with consent or no, which greatly complicates the issue. To illustrate, the instance where Dr. Jones at John Hopkins took samples of Henrietta's cervix tumor to use for cancer research by George Guy was a situation in which should be justified as the best course of action Dr. Jones took (53). Not only did the tissue taken provide the medical world a vital resource for research and study, but also it failed to have any negative effects on the deceased owner, Henrietta Lacks, yet many people found it as questionable. Moreover, the abuse of tissues taken from patients cannot be ignored such as the Moore v. Regents of the University of California Moore sued because he did not want the commercialization of his tissue and his doctor, Golde, did not inform him of the financial potential of his tissue before requesting consent; however, these abuses have demonstrated that the lack of “informed consent” when requesting tissue dona...
During the process of research, professionals collect data or identifiable private information through intervention or interaction. While this is a vital part of the scientific and medical fields, every precaution must be taken by researchers to protect the participants' rights. Ethics, outlined by the Belmont report; requirements, described by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS); and regulations, laid out by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are verified by an Institutional Review Board (IRB). This procedure assures that all human rights are safeguarded during the entire research process.
"Nazi Medical Experimentation: The Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments." The Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Dec. 2013.
Truog, Robert D., Walter Robinson, Adrienne Randolph, and Alan Morris. "Is Informed Consent Always Necessary For Randomized, Controlled Trials?" The New England Journal of Medicine 340, (March 1999): 804-807.
Informed consent is the basis for all legal and moral aspects of a patient’s autonomy. Implied consent is when you and your physician interact in which the consent is assumed, such as in a physical exam by your doctor. Written consent is a more extensive form in which it mostly applies when there is testing or experiments involved over a period of time. The long process is making sure the patient properly understands the risk and benefits that could possible happen during and after the treatment. As a physician, he must respect the patient’s autonomy. For a patient to be an autonomous agent, he must have legitimate moral values. The patient has all the rights to his medical health and conditions that arise. When considering informed consent, the patient must be aware and should be able to give a voluntary consent for the treatment and testing without being coerced, even if coercion is very little. Being coerced into giving consent is not voluntary because others people’s opinions account for part of his decision. Prisoners and the poor population are two areas where coercion is found the most when giving consent. Terminally ill patients also give consent in hope of recovering from their illness. Although the possibilities are slim of having a successful recovery, they proceed with the research with the expectation of having a positive outcome. As stated by Raab, “informed consent process flows naturally from the ‘partnership’ between physician and patient” (Raab). Despite the fact that informed consent is supposed to educate the patients, it is now more of an avoidance of liability for physicians (Raab). Although the physician provides adequate information to his patient, how can he ensure that his patient properly ...
Autonomy is a concept found in moral, political, and bioethical reasoning. Inside these connections, it is the limit of a sound individual to make an educated, unpressured decision. Patient autonomy can conflict with clinician autonomy and, in such a clash of values, it is not obvious which should prevail. (Lantos, Matlock & Wendler, 2011). In order to gain informed consent, a patient
When a person seeks medical attention they go with the hope that their personal rights will not be violated with the belief that doctors will uphold their personal standards. Unfortunately, this is not always so for people who visit the hospital. There are documented cases in United States history involving African Americans being experimented on for the greater good without their knowledge or consent, and some of the most heinous cases involve doctors injecting their study groups with life threatening diseases. What happens when good science goes bad and who has the right to relegate the status of another human being as less than? In this research paper we will examine a clinical testing case study featuring the violation and exploitation
First of all, I think that an important element to address about the informed consent is confidentiality. Confidentiality is important to address because it allows clients to know that the information
Ethics refers to the values and customs of a community at a particular point in time. At present, the term ethics is guided by the moral principles that guide our everyday actions. These moral principles guide the researcher into deciding what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. The foundation of medical ethics is governed by two philosophical frameworks: deontology, and utilitarianism. However, ultimately, the ethics committees need to balance the risks, and benefits for the participants and the community associated with the particular research proposal.
Looking beyond the Nuremberg Code and applying it to modern medical research ethics, there are many challenges that it poses. Many have argued that the Code tries to provide for all unforeseen events, which restricts the researcher by requiring him to anticipate every situation, demanding the impossible. The most important contribution of the Code is the first principle, which says that voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. The subject involved should have legal capacity to give consent, should have free power of choice, as well as sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the experiment. This restricts that populations upon which some experiment may be conducted, since many do not have “legal capacity”. For instance, studies of mental illness and children’s diseases have been curtailed because neither of these populations has the legal capacity to give consent. Another group of people, prisoners, are never really able to give voluntary consent since they might be enticed by financial rewards, special treatment, and the hope of early release in exchange for participating in the human experimentation projects. British biostatitcian Sir Austin Bradford Hill also questioned whether it was important to inform a research subject who was receiving a placebo since it does...
The story about Henrietta Lacks is the evidence that the ethics of medical processes need to be improved. For a long time, many patients have been victims of malpractice. Sometimes, the doctors still can do anything without the agreement from patients. Any medical institution needs to hold the integrity on any consent form that is signed by a patient. To summarize, the story of Henrietta Lacks could be the way to improve the standardization and equality of medical institutions in the future.
Informed consent is a very serious decision a patient has to make when it comes to their health and consenting to procedures that are believed to cure or treat their current health status. It is important to address the effectiveness of the role a physician play in the informed consent process assuring that the patient has given truly informed consent and what safeguards can be put in place to assure the patient is exercising informed consent. Informed consent is based on the fact that the person consenting is a rational individual that is aware of the action to which he/she is consenting. Allen and McNamara (2011) notes that "On the standard understanding, the important elements of informed consent are the provision of information, the voluntariness of the choice and the competence of the chooser to make the choice— so the potential research participant should be provided with information relevant to the decision to participate, they should be able to choose freely about their participation and they should be competent to decide.
After World War II ended, the Allied powers held a tribunal which led to multiple trials against major war criminals, military, and Nazi leadership officials. The Nuremberg code was one of the first trials and became known as The Doctors’ Trial which occurred in 1947 (Jarmusik). Basically twenty-three German Nazi Party physicians conducted cruel and unforgiving experiments on prisoners that were being held captive. These medical experiments were often conducted on Jewish prisoners and often performed in the Auschwitz concentration camps (Jarmusik). In the Palace of Justice, a trial was performed in Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany. The trial was performed here, because it was an undamaged building and was symbolic to the Nazi