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Ethics Case Study: Bad Blood

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After reading the case study “Bad Blood”, the primary focus of this discussion board is to talk about why people were involved in the research study, the ethical principles violated within the case study, and would the study be conducted today. There were quite a few people involved with the research study.
The people of Macon County were mostly African American, and were living in poverty (Fourtner, Fourtner, & Herreid, 2000). These people were targeted to be included in the study, because they were living in poverty and didn’t have adequate access to health care like non-poverty individuals did. According to Fourtner, Fourtner, and Herreid (2000), the health officials made it mandatory for these individuals to take part of the syphilis testing. This was done before the actual experimentation was started, and some individuals had been taking medication to help treat the disease but never had enough to cure it. The men who were involved in the study wanted to be cured, and wanted to be involved within the study because they hadn’t had any medical care in the past and this …show more content…

All people have the right to choose what treatment options they are willing to undergo, but the Macon County men didn’t have a choice but to undergo the testing for syphilis. This is an ethical principal that was violated. Another ethical principle that needs to be looked at is that the study was a non-therapeutic way to look at the progression of the disease (Fourtner, Fourtner, & Herreid, 2000). This is unethical due to it is violating beneficence, nonmalificence, and autonomy. It is also violating justice, because some of the men had already started treatment, but funds were insufficient, so they discontinued it. It could also be thought of as nonmalificent because they were doing more harm than good with discontinuing the medications for these men. When thinking about ethical principles, we also need to think about if the study would be conducted

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There have been many conflicts in the past in the medical field about violating patients’ privacy rights. In the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, there is an issue where her cells are taken to check what she went to the hospital for, yet, her cells weren’t only checked for that. Her cells were being transported, sold, and even injected into other people for experiments without any form of consent. The Skid Row Cancer Study and the Henrietta Lacks study are similar in the way that they both have some ethical issues having to do with consent. Around the 1950’s, Dr. Perry Hudson (a medical researcher from Columbia University) wanted to perform some prostate biopsies to see who had prostate cancer in Manhattan on 1,200.

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The PHS (Public Health Service) department recruited local doctors and nurses who would not treat the men with syphilis (Clinton). They had white physicians within their department administer the study (Batten). There were 400

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This experiment, conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service, was intent to study the natural progression of syphilis in African American male population. The study participants voluntarily participated in the study but the researchers did not properly inform the participants on the availability of treatment or the risks of the disease if untreated. To make the matter worse, the participants were deliberately led to believe that they were receiving treatment from the Public Health Service for free, while the actual treatment was being withheld to achieve the purpose of the research. In today’s point of view, it is surprising that even the federal agency did not respect the dignity of human rights for the sake of research. In Henrietta’s era, even the federal agency did not follow the proper informed consent procedure, and a prestigious institution like John’s Hopkins did not have any regulations or office such as Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) to govern their research protocols to protect human subjects and their rights.

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The John Hopkins Hospital was not the only place that violated people with color in this way. A study was done in Macon County, Alabama with black male patients who had syphilis. This study was designed to find out a history

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Around the 1900s, doctors’ experimentation on their patients that involved their consent had raised little concern. Between 1920 and 1930, Syphilis was a crucial health problem. Healthcare was offered to people who earned low incomes in the South. African Americans were normally low-income citizens in the South and they were not perceived equal to whites. They were prone to have more health problems.

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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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In the context of medical research, informed consent provides individuals with the opportunity to accept or decline involvement in research, and thereby adheres to their right to choose. Obtaining consent from donors is not limited to simply seeking permission, but involves explaining the nature and consequences of research in an honest and understandable manner. When this aspect of informed consent is ignored, unethical research ensues. For example, during the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, US Public Health researchers studied the progression of syphilis in African American men, under the false pretense of curing their “bad blood”. Though a treatment of penicillin was available at the time, researchers idly observed as subjects died painful, preventable deaths.

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In order to have a correct understanding of syphilis’ development, the USPHS ensured that the subjects did not receive treatment from other sources. This inhumane experiment lasted for fifty years until the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific affairs appointed an Ad Hoc Advisory Panel to review the study. Soon, it was revealed to the public that the victims did not receive adequate information to provide informed consent. The Panel also discovered that researchers did not offer the victims treatment even when penicillin became the cure for syphilis in 1947. The doctors

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In addition to this misinformation, patients were not provided with a way out of the study, effectively dooming them to a life without treatment for the disease. This, of course, contradicts the principles of non-maleficence, as the patients were made to suffer with their ailment throughout the study, even though they could have been easily treated. Although Penicillin was the standard treatment for syphilis by the mid-1940s, participants’ in the Tuskegee Study were denied access to it (Walker, C. (2009). The study infringes on the principle of justice in major aspects.

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The Tuskegee study of Untreated Syphilis began in 1932, mainly designed to determine the history of untreated latent syphilis on 600 African American men in Tuskegee, Alabama. 201 out of 600 men were non-syphilitic just unknowingly involved in the study as a control group This study is known to be “the most infamous biomedical research study in the U.S history”. Most of these men had never visited a doctor and they had no idea what illness they had. All of the men agreed to be a participant thinking they were being treated for “bad blood” and plus they were given free medical care and meals.

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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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Run by the United States Public Health Service (USPHS), the research took place at the Tuskegee Institute, while the subjects of the study were chosen from Macon County, Alabama (“About

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The study would ultimately prove that everyone, no matter the color of their skin, is equal when it comes to the disease of syphilis. The intention behind manipulating the men was not for the greater good of society, but instead was for the greater good of Dr. Brodus and Miss Evers. Although the actions of Dr. Brodus and Miss Evers prove to be unethical, I also find the actions to be unprofessional. Miss Evers should have informed the men of the severity of the disease, as well as how the disease is passed from one individual to another. They failed to inform their patients of many of the risks that came along with the disease.

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In the movie “Miss Evers Boys”, Nurse Eunice Evers takes an offer to work with two doctors on a program that was federally funded to treat patients afflicted with the syphilis disease in Tuskegee Alabama. The patients were only men and they agreed to take part in it because of the free treatment. After a while the program ended and money was offered to conduct an experiment. The experiment was the study of the effects of the syphilis disease on these men, specifically African Americans, whom didn’t receive treatment. Nurse Evers finds out from doctor Brodus that the four hundred plus men along with 200 uninfected men who served as controls, will be studied and not treated.

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

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