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Ethical Issues In The Movie Miss Evers

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During the year of 1932 in Tuskegee, Macon Country, Alabama in the United States Nurse Eunice Evers became a part of The Tuskegee Experiment Study created by the United States Public Health Service (USPHS). The movie Miss Evers’ Boys portrays the events that led up to the creation of The Tuskegee Experiment Study and what followed afterwards from Nurse Evers’ portray. There were numeral ethical violations that took place with the experiment itself and what occurred throughout the years the study was still being carried out. At the beginning of the study there were no proven treatments for the disease. The Tuskegee Experiment Study was a research experiment targeting a group of African American males who had syphilis in which they after failing to acquire the needed funds to continue the study decided along with the government to discontinue all treatments for the control and no-control males to determine ultimately whether or not it had the same outcome for white people as it did African Americans. The men participating in the study were informed by Nurse Evers that they were to be treated for "bad blood,” which was a localized term used by people to describe a host of …show more content…

Brodus worked with Nurse Evers and agreed with Dr. Douglas to name the study, The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in The Negro Male in which 600 African American men would participate in the study in which there were 399 males who had syphilis which was the experimental group and 201 were control subjects. Many of the subjects were poor and illiterate laborers from the county. Nurse Evers testified before several 1973 Senate hearings centered on the Tuskegee study. (Caplan,

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In the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was mentioned. Throughout Henrietta’s time of being sick with cervical cancer, she was not told she had the disease. Scientists took samples of Henrietta’s cells and brought them to the prestigious Tuskegee Institute for further study (Skloot pg. 23). It was at this same institute that the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was performed.

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Those who live on a very low income, who are from developing countries or are part of the lower classes agree to participate for financial reasons, and usually were not fully informed about all of the risks and side effects (Moreno). In the United States the more vulnerable segments of the population have continuously been the subjects of medical experimentation, but African Americans, including children, assumed a unbalanced burden and suffered the most brutal, and invasive of the medical experiments. In the article written by Jonathan D. Moreno, “Master Sergeant James B. Stanley volunteered to be a subject in a study advertised as developing and testing measures against chemical weapons, but Stanley was never told that the clear liquid he drank for the test contained a psychoactive drug, nor was he debriefed or monitored for the hallucinations that followed, nor did he understand the source of the emotional problems that disrupted his personal life, leading finally to his divorce in

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The lifetime of Henrietta Lacks is a deterrent tale that reflects the intrinsic contradiction between the known purpose of medical research to provide profit to humans and the disturbing reality of deliberate profiteering in advancements in science. Rebecca Skloot was not the first to investigate recognized racism and ethics in medicine and this exposition should not be taken as a review of her innovative research for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Yet the book focuses on medical institutions which have successfully adopted the strategies which have been caught engaging in bad practices over the years. Matthew C. Nisbet and Declan Fahy in "Bioethics in Popular Science: Evaluating the Media Impact of the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

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This study was passed and funded through Congress; however they did not know the full story. The wrong in this study was that the men did not give informed consent and did not receive any treatment. The men were studied till their autopsy, which is obviously death. This sparked much controversy and changed human experimentation forever.

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Informed Consent “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” details the injustice and hardships that an African American woman endured when skin color determined the value of a person/during a time dominated by racial segregation/when racial segregation was the law of the land. Born in Roanoke, Virginia, on August 1, 1920, Henrietta Lacks was forced to follow to racial segregation laws that prohibited Blacks from interacting with Whites in such public places as bathrooms, seating areas, colleges, and hospitals. Like all African Americans, she was treated as an inferior member of society due to her skin color. At the age of thirty, Mrs. Lacks had developed cervical cancer and went to Johns Hopkins Hospital, which only treated Blacks at the time.

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Misunderstanding regarding the details of the Tuskegee syphilis study is common, but the historical accuracy is not as relevant as the strength of the beliefs that formed as a result of the study7. Gamble (1997) argues that roots of the fear of medical exploitation dates further back in history when, the bodies of Black people in Baltimore were taken from their graves for dissection in the 1830s,three female slaves were subjected to an estimated 30 gynecological surgeries each in Alabama in the late 1840s, and folklore describing night riders who kidnapped Black people for use in medical experiments in

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In Tuskegee, Alabama a group of men were chosen for an experiment involving the observation of how syphilis occurs in black men and its long term non-treated consequences. At the time of the experiment, the only treatment that was available was a heavy metal therapy; however, the scientists believed it was doing more harm than good. Therefore, they did not inform the men about the treatment and distracted them with basic incentives like hot meals and transportation. When penicillin, a cure for syphilis, was discovered the doctors made the decision to shield the cure away from the men. This is proof that scientists are

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Tuskegee Film Reflection Allison Elliott California Baptist University HSC210-B Ethics in Healthcare Professor Lindsay Fahnestock April 4, 2023 What ethical principles were violated in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study? The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment violated ethical principles of Fidelity, respect for rights and dignity, coercion, justice, integrity, beneficence, benefits, and burdens. The experiment was conducted without the informed consent of participants, who were largely poor and uneducated African American men.

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But unfortunately, the experiment was also never clearly explained to them, they had thought it was just the best possible treatment expected to cure the sickness they might have had. Many unethical practices were evident in this study, in this case, the most important one was informed consent, which is a consent given by a patient to a doctor for treatment with full knowledge of the possible risks and benefits. None of the participants in the Tuskegee study

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It has now been a quarter of a century, and yet the images and heartache that still evolve when the words "Tuskegee Syphilis Study" are brought up, still haunts people around the world and touches upon many professionals such as social workers, medical examiners, and so forth. Sometimes people hear about this disgusting human experiment in a highly visible way directed to the entire country as an example of what we as a country and people, in general, should not do. This occurred when the study first made national news in 1972, when President Clinton offered a formal apology, or when Hollywood actors star in a fictionalized television movie of the story. On the other hand the audience may become fainter: kept alive only by memories and stories told in the African American community, in queries that circulate over the world wide web and radio talk shows, or even in courses such as this one being taught by social workers, historians, sociologists, or bioethicists. This is neither the first nor the last unethical human experiment done under the human study for the medical purposes umbrella, basically stating it is ok to sacrifice a few people in the name of medical research.

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Syphilis Syphilis is an acute disease that was not perfectly understood until scientists start to do clinical researches over patients having the disease and the bacteria themselves. Experiments were done on syphilis to understand how it proceeds, and how it can be cured. After the discovery of this affliction, doctors tried very hard to understand the disease, so they did various experiments. some of them were legal while others were illegal. In 1932, The Tuskegee syphilis experiment was done on black people in Alabama by U.S public health service.

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The Tuskegee syphilis experiment of 20th century and syphilis study of Guatemala violate most of the concepts discussed in the Belmont report. The most notable may be identified in the “Basic Ethical Principles” and “Application portions of the report (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2016). The large number of men who were involved in the syphilis studies experienced and/or suffered from some on the most negative consequences that may result, when some of the concepts discussed in the Belmont reported may be neglected. Specifically, “respect for persons”, “beneficence”, and “justice”; as well as informed consent voluntariness, and comprehension (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2016). “Beneficence” is another severely

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I believe an unethical issue arises when they convince the men to join the study because they are so uneducated. Miss Evers tried to use terms that the men could follow with ease. In the time period in which the movie takes place, it was very common for African American males to drop out of school in order to support and provide for their family. Miss Evers offered the minimal amount of information as possible in order to convince the men to join the study. She would say the men had “bad blood” instead of saying exactly what syphilis was.

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“Tuskegee syphilis study, official name Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, American medical research project that earned notoriety for its unethical experimentation on African American patients in the rural South” (Britannica, 2016). The scientists wanted to see how syphilis affects black people differently than to white people. 400 black men were test subjects for the study without their knowledge. There was already a cure for the disease but they did not want to give the participants the cure because they wanted to see how the disease affects them. This is unethical because it gave African Americans unfair

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This study was referred to as the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis

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