Ethics in Medical Experiments Research Paper

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The Tuskegee syphilis study is one of the studies looked at for ethical violations in health care research. There are a few different violations that were part of this study. As Heintzelman (2003) notes, the study was conducted to see the course of untreated syphilis. They were subject to "spinal taps without anesthesia", and where subject to heavy metals therapy but were not given antibiotics when it became known that penicillin could treat syphilis. The latter in particular would form an egregious ethical violation, because the subjects could have been cured of their ailment, but the study continued anyway, meaning that the best interests of the subjects was not taken into consideration for this study. The subjects were never offered penicillin nor any way of exiting the study.

The ethical concerns also included the issue of informed consent. The true nature of the study was not revealed to the subjects. They were told that they were being treated for bad blood, which didn't hold any meaning in the medical sense. They did not know that they were being studied for syphilis and did not have informed consent at any point in the study, which went on for more than 40 years (CDC, 2017).

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Thus, the researchers behind the study not only made errors in judgment at the outset of the study, by not seeking out any form of informed consent, but they continued in their unethical behavior throughout the entire run of the study, until public outcry, investigations and lawsuits finally brought the study to a close.

The Willowbrook hepatitis case was another issue of egregious violation of ethics. In this case, The Willowbrook State School was a home for mentally disabled children. It had a high rate of hepatitis, which nearly all residents had. There was some question as to whether they received it via exposure to the water or via direct means, but there was reason to believe that many were injected directly with hepatitis and others were "fed hepatitis-contaminated feces" (NPR, 2008).

There are obvious ethical issues here. First, if there was any direct action to give people hepatitis, that would go far beyond an ethical violation; it would constitute a criminal act. This would have been done without any sanction as a medical experiment, as Willowbrook was not that sort of medical institution that it would normally carry out such experiments. But even….....

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