Medical Research Experiments

The art of medicine and curing diseases was not always approached in a scientific way. In fact, many advances occurred between 1919 to 1939, after technological advances allowed scientists to apply the scientific method to medical research. At this time, the ethics of using patients as test subjects either for new medicines or as samples for further testing were not considered. An extreme example of this was the Nazi’s using concentration camp inmates – including children – to run painful and invasive experiments. More modern examples are not so easy to identify as unethical, however. While amputating a leg to develop methods to deal with fractures and war wounds is obviously unethical, harvesting cells to develop a vaccine is not so clear cut, as the disadvantage to the patient is hard to identify. Coming from the various Nazi testing and especially the Nuremberg testing and trials, another code of ethics was developed, called the Nuremberg Code.

It hasn’t changed that the average person doesn’t like to feel pain or be ill. The evolution of medicine from 1776 to 1938 in the United States depended on the knowledge of current diseases and treatment at that time. The major diseases during this time were pneumonia, influenza, tuberculosis, gastrointestinal infections, heart disease and cerebrovascular disease.1 Ironically, much of those diseases still exist today. Over time, the world’s demand for drugs for any type of illness or disease drastically skyrocketed. Was the medicine really working or were people psyched into believing they had an illness? The diagnosis and treatment was incorrect many times, resulting in “shoulda, coulda, and wouldas” when dealing with diagnosis and medicine. Without a scientific basis, medical doctors, such as Benjamin Rush were ineffective with proper treatment, and quacks promoted strange treatments as to say: Yackedy Quack, Don’t Talk Back. By the end of the 20th Century, one could say American medicine was on the rise and researchers and physician were much more respected.

As part of the trials of those performing the medical experiments the Nuremburg Code was developed. Much of the code remains part of the ethical code of medical research today. Informed consent of participants and experimentation only for the good of society are in place today because of the Nuremburg Code. Today there are also “scientifically qualified personal” (Benedict & Georges, 2006, p.278) standards for those performing the experiments. During the time of the Holocaust the German medical teaching community also developed a “model of medical school affiliated with research universities” (Rubenfeld, 2011, p.517) that has become the model for many prestigious medical schools around the world. While many were horrified by what had been going on in Germany during the Holocaust, today the medical research community utilized the lessons to protect medical research participants and to ensure medical research practices meet acceptable

Additionally human medical research studies often targeted those who came to public teaching institutions desperately seeking free medical treatment and who generally looked up to doctors and experimenters as experts in the field who were there to help them. While this motivation may seem logical, it is often faulty as many human medical research studies throughout history demonstrate that the motivation of medical researches is often not the care of those currently suffering from a particular condition but the future returns on the cures or medical treatments that may be discovered during the study (McKie). As with many such unethical studies, the participants often do not give consent and are not informed of known dangers to the procedure, medications or lack of treatment. The use of individuals who are poor, uneducated, and lack medical insurance in combination with prestigious university research institutions and the white coated, well-educated researchers motivated by discoveries of cures on the scientific frontier results in abuses of individuals.

The experiments they did on people were unethical and the doctors believed they had worked. They include

The medical field is advancing everyday, yet “Estimates show diagnostic errors kill 40,000 to 80,000 hospitalized patients annually, based on autopsy studies over the past four decades ”(Landro). If you go in the middle of the average deaths per year, about 60,000 deaths a year, multiply that by forty. An estimated 2,400,000 killed in the last forty years with many illnesses or issues that were treatable. Doctor misdiagnosis is a serious and growing issue in society. These misdiagnoses are costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Its being shown, doctors are ignoring signs in patients. With so many doctors ignoring signs, certain groups of doctors are starting to practice defensive medicine in order to be protected from a misdiagnoses. Misdiagnosis

When one researches about the medical ethics in human experimentation, it is difficult to disregard the harsh realities of it. As Leonard Nimoy stated in his role as Spock in the movie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. This is the cruel truth that be seen everywhere, but many people tend to ignore it since it is such a dreary thought. Many people, especially those in third world countries, are exploited every day. Large corporate companies come to typically poorer foreign nations, where there is a large gap between the rich and poor, to find cheaper workers. Many people in these foreigners tend to be desperate for money and immediately sign up for these jobs. Typical corporations would hire these people and make them work in inhumane working conditions such as long hours, less pay, and give no sanitation facilities. Although this happens on an everyday basis, there are very few people out there who challenge the large corporations. This example can also apply to medical ethics, sometimes a small amount of people have to suffer through experiments to help the general public. Although this is a morbid thought, it has been used in the past. During the mid-twentieth century, many American scientist believe that experimenting on a few people and making them suffer would create results that would be very beneficial to the general public. Today, most modern developed countries don’t believe in this ideology, but there are

Human experimentations have been performed many times by scientist in order to solve medical mysteries in the past. These experimentations can link back to the early 1700s when George I offered free pardon to any inmate who was willing to be injected with smallpox (Wellness Directory of Minnesota). Human experimentation has always been a hot topic as it has been argued that it is both necessary and also morally wrong since it can both hurt and help and individual. People have argued that there is no other subject to be experimented on as there aren’t many other animals or subjects which share the same anatomy as humans. It can also be argued that some of the treatments performed on these individuals can potentially cause the deaths of the person

In today's society the medical field is changing every single day. Everyday something new and improved comes out; however, this wasn't always the case. It wasn't until the 19th century that medical was really being understood. "Medicine became recognizably “modern” in the nineteenth century, producing new inventions, new theories, and new curative powers" (Hansen). The problem back

It is argued that human experimentation is a direct violation of ethics and human rights. “Most ethical decisions in medicine are based on theories of ethics.” (Medical 2). To decide if an experiment is ethical or not, doctors should consider; whether or not the testing is therapeutic or nontherapeutic, if the experiment is research or just practice, the consent given to the doctor, and the risks to the procedure. (Medical 2). But some doctors decide to put medical research before patients and societies ethical beliefs. In 1963, physicians in a New York hospital injected several elderly patients with cancer cells without consent to study immune response. (Human 2). Also that same year, the government discovered some physicians were injecting pregnant women with thalidomide, although it hadn’t been approved for usage in the United States. (Human

As the human race evolved, intellectual peoples began to realize the necessity of medical advancements for the survival of the species. Scientific idealists would observe the human body to find cures to illnesses, but due to human morality their ability to further the research often became limited. It was essential for scientists to better understand medical related issues, so they started to perform their hypothesized experiments on specific animals. The data recovered led to a discovery that certain species’ genetic, biological and behavioral characteristics closely resemble those of the human race, allowing us to replicate many symptoms of human conditions. Although animal experimentation may seem morally wrong, as one of the

Modern Medicine is effective but can be dangerous, carries risks and research can be manipulated. Kate Mcbride works in healthcare but argues that modern medicine can be dangerous and can even make some diseases worse because they aren’t being treated the right way by getting to the root of the problem. That’s horrible because so many patients put trust in their doctors and believe that they are being completely cured. In fact, many people probably don’t realize that many pharmaceutical companies encourage physicians to prescribe certain drugs because of the financial benefits which seems immoral, greedy and just plain wrong for healthcare (Mcbride). Patients should be able to be treated safely and effectively instead of being used for income for pharmaceutical companies and the physicians. There is evidence that shows that many people are not getting quality medical care. According to a recent study done by a team of

Physicians had a more sophisticated understanding of the body systems than the rudimentary ideals of Galen’s teachings on the humors in medieval times. Consequently, medical testing began to deviate towards usage for diagnosis. This approach to medicine, however, differed from long-standing medical social mores. Physicians had long been trained to rely on their observations of the patient and the patient’s description of symptoms as the sources to derive diagnosis. Physicians of the 19th century were skeptical and criticized the notion of utilizing medical “experimentation” as the standard for determining a

Quoting Newton, “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” From this, we can understand that no matter what a human being does, there is always a ready-made answer for it. Smallpox is a virus that killed more than 300 million people by the 20th century (BBC, 2011). But, the cure for it was Edward Jenner’s vaccine. Swine flu killed more than 300,000 people during 2009 (The Sydney Morning Herald, 2012). But, the cure for it was a set of effective and successful vaccines. Like this, medical advancements have been playing an important role in all human beings by creating a new layer of protection to all those viruses out there. As a virologist working in the American Society of Virology, we test many

I strongly argue that Andrew Wakefield’s unsubstantiated and unchecked studies caused more harm than the Stanford prison experiment. Though the Stanford experiment was bad in itself because it was not supervised and was allowed to “go past the second day” (Leithead, 2011), it only affected a couple of students who were volunteers. But Wakefield’s work made parents keep their children away from immunization, and this led to “Measles outbreaks in the UK in 2008 and 2009 as well as pockets of measles in the USA and Canada” (Rao & Andrade, 2011).