Henrietta Lacks Research Paper

In doing so, he pays particularly close attention to black patients and their relations with health care policies and practices. Smedly maintains that blacks are not only the victims of, inpatient and outpatient treatment, racial policies, and other services but also the victims of its consequences. He argues that many health care administrators are agents to a system of inequality that support provider and administrator biases, geographical inequalities, and racial stereotypes (Smedly 2012).

Black or Negro doctors were not common in America during the first half of the century: 500, or about 2.6%, of New York City’s 19,000 physicians were Negro in 1963 (Curtis 64). New York City and Chicago are major cities in the United States, they also are similar when it came to population. It is to say that since New York City only had a few Black Physicians during the time then Chicago reflected the same range of numbers when it came to their black physicians. In fact, African-Americans had only made up “3% of all professional workers in [New York City] in 1950”(Curtis 64). African American women were allowed to work in the medical professions but they were mostly limited to the nursing

Since the publication of the Institute of Medicine’s “Unequal Treatment Report” in 2002, highlighting the startling but harsh truths behind these health care differences, there has been a renewed interest in understanding the sources of these inconsistencies, with any seeking to identify contributing factors in hopes of creating an effective solution in reducing or eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care

As future pharmacists, we are going to face with not only the medications but also the patients, which the former ones are our tools while the latter ones are the people we use correct tools to care about. We are required to combine our pharmacy knowledge among medications with patients’ different health conditions to create the patient-centered care and provide the best outcomes. However, this care trend is in transition now, from professional-orientated to patient-centered.

What if you had the ability to save several lives through something only you had ? Wouldn’t you like to be told and given proper credit? Well unfortunately that is not case for Henrietta Lacks. Henrietta held a powerful and significant key which has helped as a cure for many things and is still being used till this day . I choose to write about Henrietta due to the fact that she is one of histories and science unsung hero’s.

Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman who was born on August 1, 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia. She lived with her mother until the age of four and then she moved in with her uncle on a tobacco plantation after her death. While staying there she ended up sharing a room with her first cousin David “Day” Lacks, after sharing a room with him for many years, in 1935 Henrietta had their first child at the age of fourteen, they named him Lawrence, then, four years later they had their second child Elsie and then in 1941 they were married.

Henrietta Lacks was born in Roanoke, Virginia on August 1, 1920. After 1924 when Henrietta's mother Eliza died giving birth to tenth child. Henrietta and her siblings where taken to her fathers hometown, clover. When all of the siblings arrived at clover they had to be divided and split up to live with different relatives in different homes. Henrietta ended up with Tommy Lacks, her grandfather and her cousin David Lacks also known as Day. As Henrietta grew older, she began to draw attention from he cousins Day and Joe. Since she had been sharing a room with Day ever since she got there she found herself pregnant with Day's child. At the age of fourteen she gives birth to her first child, Lawrence and at the age of eighteen she has her second

In the novel, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, scientists steal cancerous cells from a middle aged black woman named Henrietta Lacks without her consent. She soon passed away and her cells were then put in culture and, unlike any other cells previously, succeeded in growing and reproducing outside of the body. This new breakthrough led to a scientific revolution that changed the world as we know it. The cells, called HeLa, were mass produced in factories and distributed all around the world. They allowed scientists to conduct studies and experiments that were impossible before; consequently, numerous new discoveries and cures were made and polio was eradicated. However, Henrietta’s family had no idea what her cells did

The National institute of Health, Rebecca Skloot, and John Hopkins Hospital have distorted Henrietta Lacks Legacy. In 1951, the Johns Hopkins Hospital took cervical cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks, and developed the HeLa cell line. Neither Henrietta nor her family gave the hospital permission to use her cells at the time. Her cells contributed to major medical discoveries, including the development of polio vaccine. Henrietta’s family was never compensated for the money that they made off of her cells. It was not until 1973 that her children discovered, by accident, that their mother's cells, now immortalized, had become a major boon to medicine and that many people had become rich from marketing them. Ron Henrietta’s

The central idea of chapters 20 "The HeLa bomb" and 22, "The Fame she so richly deserves" is the truth behind HeLa, or the coming out of Henrietta Lacks, the owner of the HeLa cells. The first time Henrietta was identified in print for her belongings was during the journal Jones and his colleagues published, which read "The biopsy... has secured for the patient, Henrietta Lacks as HeLa, an immortality which has now reached 20 years." (Chapter 22, Page 173) Sadly, although Henrietta's name was published in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, Henrietta's name was not known to the common crowd until the War on Cancer. Where Russian scientists claimed to find the cancer virus in cells of Russian patients, however "...those cells weren't from

What if someone used your body or parts of your body for science without your permission. Patients rights is the right to keep anything medically safe and locked away from the public. The only people that would see it would be your doctor or anyone you grant to give that information to. People nowadays have that privilege to keep it iblprivate but back in the mid to the nineteenth century people didn’t exactly have that right to keep their information private. There was research conducted with people’s DNA that that person did not know about. Some tried to sue and get money from the doctors or scientists that worked on their tissues and made money off of them. But most people back then did not know that doctors had taken samples when they would be getting an operation done or to go and just get their blood

In the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the author, Rebecca Skloot, dives into a vast amount of information regarding a women named Henrietta Lacks, whose name is very popular in the medical world. Henrietta’s cells became the first immortal cells known to man, and have changed the way the medical world works. Skloot’s book also contains material about a Public Health problem, which became a great risk for the entire community. In general, Public Health is the process of preventing disease and promoting a healthy lifestyle for the overall community. Public Health has three main functions, assessment, policy development, and assurance, which all work together to help establish a healthy environment. In the book, the topic of bioethics came into play during a

During the 1950s, a cell line called HeLa was cultivated from a poor, African mother of five who died of cervical cancer named Henrietta Lacks. It was then mass produced for research and generated billions of dollars. Many medicinal treatments and breakthroughs, such as polio, were developed from this cell line helping billions of people to this day. Unfortunately, the woman who ultimately gave her life never received a single penny, nor her family. The Lacks family lived without insurance and still to this day has received no compensation. Given that companies and organizations, such as Microbiological Associates and the National Institutes of Health, have benefited tremendously from the cell line, they should compensate the Lacks family for it is the

One of the points raised in IOM’s article to prove that racism is a prevalent cause of health care disparity is the way the health care system is set-up, meaning at times, some hospitals and clinics can adopt a policy to contain health care cost, but may pose hindrances to minority patients’ capability to access the care.

Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital was a case that brought the issue of segregation based on race to the forefront. In the early 1960s, African Americans in the United States were still heavily experiencing racism, especially in the South. In 1946, then President Truman signed into law the Hospital Survey and Construction Act (now known as the Hill-Burton Act), whose premise was to financially assist the construction of hospitals in the U.S. to improve healthcare across the country (While, 1946). The two nonprofit hospitals named as defendants in the case received $3.5 million in funding through the Act (Showalter, 2017). Until the Simkins ruling, most hospitals in North Carolina did not allow African American patients to be seen in the same hospitals as whites. Additionally, these same hospitals did not allow African American physicians to treat patients or train as interns- even though they were fully educated and licensed. The facilities where African Americans could practice medicine were routinely overcrowded and lacked the same standard equipment that the “white” hospitals had (Thomas, 2006).