Artifact 5

Corey Johnston

3/10/19

BI-245X-01

Ethical Implications Surrounding Medicine

and Society’s Perception of Medical Professionals

Throughout history, there have been many situations regarding unethical circumstances in practicing medicine. This was flagged at the end of WWII in the Nuremburg Trials. Since, there have been ethical codes which medical professionals must follow in order to take part in things like clinical trials or clinical studies. Much of these codes came not only from Nazi experiments during WWII, but from experiments such as those in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. There are also a number of ethical issues surrounding infectious diseases, such as vaccinations, along with population biases to certain ethnicities. The consequences of these unethical studies in regards to gender, race, and social status, have all impacted societies trust in medical studies as well as medical professionals.

There have been many ethical issues when dealing with infectious diseases. In an article by Heather Ann Thompson, she writes that in many prisons, such as Attica, doctors have performed many disgusting, under-the-table experiments on prisoners, whom “happily” volunteered for his or her study. At Attica, the medical professional there asked for volunteers to perform in an experiment where he would be ultimately presenting these prisoners with leprosy. For many, the answer was yes, simply because it was an easy way to get money while incarcerated. Little is known to what extent these prisoners were told the full story behind the experiment, but it is known that the doctor was influencing these prisoners with an awful and disfiguring disease in that of leprosy. There have been many unethical studies in regards to infectious disease, far beyond those of these prison experiments. This has been a custom for many centuries, as many doctors want answers to certain diseases, losing sight that we are all human, and no matter what race, social background, or stage we are in life, we all deserve the same rights as people and deserve to be treated as such.

The Tuskegee experiment is one of the prime examples of unethical studies being conducted in the United States, during a time of civil reform. Individuals in this study were not given details about the nature of the study, but were simply told that they would be treated for syphilis, but in fact were not. Government doctors in the US public health services supposedly wanted to learn whether syphilis showed different symptoms in different races. They targeted older, black males, who were not economically stable. They told these individuals that they had “bad blood” and “this was their last chance for special treatment”. These doctors broke the Nuremburg Code which was developed after the study had started. Also, even after penicillin was found to be the cure for syphilis, and these individuals sought help from other professionals, they were quickly re-directed back to the study and told that they were getting the help that was needed. This ties in with the issue of informed consent in today’s society. That people who are being put in clinical studies/trials are to be informed of the nature of the study and each study has to have a set of guidelines for participants to follow. This study ended after 50 years, when a press release of the study was informed to the public. All that was owed to the participants was a “lump sum” of $38,000. For all of the pain and suffering that these individuals faced over the course of these experiments, surely, they deserved more. Also, this does not even consider the people who died because of the experiment/ “study”. There has also been reports of unethical studies as shown in the Guatemalan venereal disease study. US government researchers and their Guatemalan colleagues experimented without consent on more than 5,000 Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, people with psychiatric disorders, orphans, and even prostitutes. They exposed 1,308 adults to syphilis, gonorrhea, or chancroid. This is another prime example of why ethical panels are used in today’s medical studies, to prevent awful acts of humans such as these.

All of these unethical studies have had a huge impact on how people perceive medical professionals in today’s society. Unethical experiments such as those listed above have caused a mistrust in medical professionals worldwide and nationally. Prime examples are shown in the Tuberculosis outbreak in Alabama, where people lost trust in doctors and thought that they would be ostracized if seen by doctors. These people say, “I don’t want nobody knowing my business”. This is the stigmatism of that area and has been that way since word of unethical practices have been released. Also, after the Tuskegee Syphilis study was released to the public, many people, especially those in the black community, did not want to rely on medical help simply because they could not trust doctors to treat them with respect and could not ensure that doctors wanted to help their patients. This has caused the mistrust in medical professionals around the US for a long time, and a prime reason that clinical trials suffered to achieve many volunteers for a long time. Until people start to find trust in medicine, this will be a issue for a long time to come, especially in regards to vaccination.