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An essay on ethical research
An essay on ethical research
Thesis on medical ethics
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What exactly is ethical behavior when it comes to human experimentation? Nowadays, people would claim it has to be honest, fair, safe, and humane. However, that criteria had not prevailed through all of history. Early on, scientists often used questionable techniques to obtain research because ethics would not be an important issue until well into the 20th century. In her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot uses tone and diction to illustrate the historical evolution of the ethics surrounding human experimentation. In the 19th and 20th centuries, researchers did not consider ethics when using minorities in research. For example, doctors tested drugs and new surgical techniques on slaves. The doctors did not even use …show more content…
Starting from that decade, the U.S. Public Health Service researchers at the Tuskegee Institute recruited black men with syphilis to study how their disease killed people. The researchers watched each man die, even after realizing penicillin could cure him. They chose black subjects specifically because they, along with many other white people, believed black people were “notoriously syphilis-soaked.” The researchers, and the public at the time, did not care about the deaths of a so-called racially inferior group. All the scientists gave to the families of those who died was a fifty-dollar stipend. Here Rebecca Skloot’s tone is more indignant. She chooses to describe the black men’s deaths as slow, painful, and preventable. She is clearly upset at the researchers’ flippant carelessness with black lives and wants the reader to understand the injustice of their actions. Also in the 1930s, in what was called the Mississippi Appendectomies, hysterectomies were performed involuntarily on poor black women. Doctors wanted to practice and to sterilize the women. Again, Skloot’s tone is upset. She uses the word choice of “unnecessary” to enforce that the doctors were not even trying to treat the women. The reason her tone might have been more passionate was because these experiments were part of a conversation she had with Roland Pattillo. She wanted to impress him so he would put her in touch with the Lacks family. A more emotional response was needed to show how much she cared about the wrongdoings black people
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by: Rebecca Skloot has a lot of themes, but one that is most relevant in my opinion is the racial politics of medicine. Throughout the chapters, there were examples of how Henrietta, being African American, prevented her from receiving the same treatment as the white woman sitting right next to her in the waiting room. The story begins with Henrietta going to Johns Hopkins Hospital and asking a physician to check a “knot on her womb.” Skloot describes that Henrietta had been having pain around that area for about a year, and talked about it with her family, but did not do anything until the pains got intolerable. The doctor near her house had checked if she had syphilis, but it came back negative, and he recommended her to go to John Hopkins, a known university hospital that was the only hospital in the area that would treat African American patients during the era of Jim Crow. It was a long commute, but they had no choice. Patient records detail some of her prior history and provide readers with background knowledge: Henrietta was one of ten siblings, having six or seven years of schooling, five children of her own, and a past of declining medical treatments. The odd thing was that she did not follow up on upcoming clinic visits. The tests discovered a purple lump on the cervix about the size of a nickel. Dr. Howard Jones took a sample around the tissue and sent it to the laboratory.
Ethical violations committed on underprivileged populations first surfaced close to 50 years ago with the discovery of the Tuskegee project. The location, a small rural town in Arkansas, and the population, consisting of black males with syphilis, would become a startling example of research gone wrong. The participants of the study were denied the available treatment in order further the goal of the research, a clear violation of the Belmont Report principle of beneficence. This same problem faces researchers today who looking for an intervention in the vertical transmission of HIV in Africa, as there is an effective protocol in industrialized nations, yet they chose to use a placebo-contro...
The Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis in the Negro Male population was studied to improve the health of poor African Americans. Men were recruited for this study and were promised free medical examinations, blood tests, and medicines. Bessie disliked going to the doctor, however, she would really not really seek health care knowing the circumstances of this case. Trusting the health care providers would be her biggest issue. Not being able to communicate and understand a patient, as a caregiver would make me not want to go to the doctor as well. Annette Dula would suggest that the need for dialogue with African Americans should be recognized as a serious bioethical problem. I would suggest that health care providers should know different dialogue to get a better understanding of their patients. I agree with the three health disparities: institutional racism, economic equality, and attitudinal barriers to
According to the Belmont Report (1979), justice is relevant to the selection of subjects of research at two levels: the social and the individual. Skloot (2010) describes how “Gey took any cells he could get his hands on” and how “TeLinde began collecting samples from any woman who walked into Hopkins with cervical cancer” (p. 30). These two doctors did not exhibit fairness in their selection of subjects. Dr. TeLinde was collecting samples from women on the color ward and did not consider the appropriateness of placing further burdens on already burdened persons. The women whose tissue samples are being gathered for research are the women who will most likely be the last to benefit; because more advantaged populations (wealthy and white) will initially be the primary
"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.
Does racism still exist today? Although many believe it was a problem in the past, it still exists today. Many People are still not aware that it still exists in our workforces, especially in medical field. Although racism in medicine can be very offense, it can sometimes be beneficial and help reveal differences in diseases based on genetic make up. These differences can be taken in the wrong manner and can lead to social problems especially if these distinctions are thought of as ethnic differences. In Gregg M. Bloche’s article. “Race, Money and Medicine”, he states that we should erase racial categories from medicine but only use them if they are beneficial for the patient’s health. Peter Clark, author of “Prejudice and the Medical Profession: A Five Year Update”, explains that racial categories should be understood because understand these different can be beneficial. Lynne D. Richardson and Marlaina Norris, authors of “Access to Health and Health Care: How Race and Ethnicity Matter”, also believe that these differences can be beneficial but want to improve the health are because they know a majority of minorities do not receive proper health care and treatment. Rebecca Skloot, author of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”, pays attention to the fact that her character, Henrietta Lacks, was not given the proper treatment and care she should have. Although Henrietta’s cells were beneficial to cancer research , she never once gave consent to the doctor’s to distribute her cells. She was taken advantage of because of her race and low income. Minorities’ opinions and beliefs should be taken into perspective because they often feel neglected which causes a sense of “distrust”. There has been a vast history of racism in the ...
Miss. Evers Boys is a movie based on the real life study called “The Tuskegee Study” that took place in Macon County, Alabama, where 400 black men who had syphilis and 200 black men without this disease participated on this study without knowing the terrible truth behind it. Also the participants were poor and uneducated sharecropper who fell for Miss. Evers persuasions and rewards that doctors were offering to participants. The main results that doctors were trying to obtain from this experiment was to gain information about how African Americans men’s bodies reacted to syphilis. During the 1930’s, society believed that black men were inferior to white men, so diseases were supposed to affect differently black men. This study in particular, the participants were not informed about the capacity that this disease could damage their human system and they were not viewed as a human being and they were used as lab rat. Furthermore, one of the doctors who were involved in this experiment Dr. Raymond Vonderlehr used the term “necropsy” that is an autopsy performed on animals when speaking about the participants of this experiment (Mananda R-G, 2012).
Ethics of Medical Research with Animals,. 'U.S. Law And Animal Experimentation: A Critical Primer - Ethics Of Medical Research With Animals'. N. p., 2014. Web. 6 May. 2014.
The Deadly Deception video scrutinizes the unjust practices of a syphilis study that began in the 1930’s on the campus of Tuskegee Institute by the U.S. Public Health Service. The experiment was conducted using hundreds of African American men that were mainly poor and illiterate. The study was called the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. Participates were deceived and lured in by promises of free medical care and survivors insurance.
Rebecca Skloot’s novel, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, depicts the violation of medical ethics from the patient and researcher perspectives specifically when race, poverty, and lack of medical education are factors. The novel takes place in the southern United States in 1951. Henrietta Lacks is born in a poor rural town, Clover, but eventually moves to urban Turner Station. She was diagnosed and treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins hospital where cells was unknowingly taken from her and used for scientific research. Rebecca Skloot describes this when she writes, “But first—though no one had told Henrietta that TeLinde was collecting sample or asked she wanted to be a donor—Wharton picked up a sharp knife and shaved two dime-sized pieces of tissue from Henrietta's cervix: one from her tumor, and one from the healthy cervical tissue nearby. Then he placed the samples in a glass dish” (33). The simple act of taking cells, which the physicians did not even think twice about, caused decades
Wepworth, Adam. "Animal Research: The Ethics of Animal Experimentation." (n.d.): n. pag. 16 July 2010. Web. 12 Nov. 2013.
Knowing the rudimentary explanation of morality, ethics could almost be described as the law of morality. The word ethics is used in an abundance of contexts and therefore is described using a vast amount of different guidelines. When biomedical or behavioural research is conducted on humans, which almost is the only research conducted on humans, a specific set of laws known as ‘The Belmont Report’ demands adherence. Originating in the USA in 1979 it is now used almost worldwide, while it is a short set of laws it explicitly states the benefits of the research must outweigh any risks to the participants, each participant must b...
Experimentations on humans, even though essential for scientific progress, pose many ethical questions where we ask ourselves if we should continue disposing human bodies in the name of medicine. We hold the same old concern about a man’s obsession with knowledge where a discovery for the good of the majority might become a justifiable reason for exploiting one human being for the good of all.
In the natural sciences there are always ethical norms that limit how knowledge can be produced. In the natural sciences, experimentation is an important method of producing knowledge but ethical judgments can limit the use of this method. There are areas that are considered unethical ...
It has long been debated as to whether it is ethical to use animals for experimentation. When considering whether animal research is ethically acceptable or not two main concerns must be raised. The first issue is whether it is absolutely necessary to use animals in order to acquire information that may contribute to the improvement of people’s health and well-being. The second issue is whether the use of animals is defendable on a moral ground.