Good Health v/s Chronic Disease

Original Source: The Washington Post
By MIKE STOBBE
The Associated Press – Sunday, February 27, 2011

Past medical testing on humans revealed

In this Friday, May 16, 1997 file picture, President Clinton, left, and Vice President Al Gore, center, reach out to Herman Shaw, 94, a Tuskegee Syphilis Study victim, during a news conference in Washington. Making amends for a shameful U.S. experiment, Clinton apologized to black men whose syphilis went untreated by government doctors. (AP Photo/Doug Mills - AP)

Inevitably, they will be compared to the well-known Tuskegee syphilis study. In that episode, U.S. health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who already had syphilis but didn’t give them adequate treatment even after penicillin became available.

These studies were worse in at least one respect – they violated the concept of “first do no harm,” a fundamental medical principle that stretches back centuries.

“When you give somebody a disease – even by the standards of their time – you really cross the key ethical norm of the profession,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics.

Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the ’60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.

Attitudes about medical research were different then. Infectious diseases killed many more people years ago, and doctors worked urgently to invent and test cures. Many prominent researchers felt it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society – people like prisoners, mental patients, poor blacks. It was an attitude in some ways similar to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews.

“There was definitely a sense – that we don’t have today – that sacrifice for the nation was important,” said Laura Stark, a Wesleyan University assistant professor of science in society, who is writing a book about past federal medical experiments.   ( Read More )