Original source : http://english.pravda.ru
Posted : July 2013
Author : Mirella Ionta
We have all heard about human experiments. Just search under
the key words "human experiment" on Google Search Engine and surely
you will find the top ten list of the most cruel research studies of the 1900s,
some of which attached a medical rhetoric rationalizing their scientific value,
while others were shamelessly performed in times of war and hatred. From the
infamous concentration camp infernos of the Nazi Germans to The Monster Study,
an experiment conducted on twenty-two orphan children in Iowa in 1939, to the
Poison Laboratory of the Soviets secret services, known as The Chamber to Unit
731, a bio-chemical warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army existing in the
pause between the two World Wars, disturbing images and reports of the
vivisection of pregnant women and the barbaric treatment of human subjects
continue to haunt the credibility of both the medical community and
governmental organizations.
Horrid stories confirm that human experiments were indeed
performed on every continent of the world at one point in history. Some were
reported to have been running in the United States until the 1970s. Some
will even go as far to argue that still today medical science continually
utilize their patients without their knowledge or consent to try out or
"test" a new medication as though they were "guinea pigs."
Psychiatry has been infamous for testing their "brain drugs" on people
who are easily diagnosed as suffering from depression without fully having the
knowledge of the root of this disease, nor its proper treatment.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, ran by the U.S. Public Health
and Service Department, from 1932 until 1972, was a medical investigation of
untreated syphilis in the male Negro. Oriented in the Tuskegee
community in Alabama,
where it was reported that high rates of syphilis were the most prevalent in
the country, the study affected 399 infected African American male subjects and
201 controls. Researchers, during the forty years the study ran, withheld
treatment from the males and, on occasion, prevented the provision of treatment
from outside sources. They also did not obtain the "informed consent"
of the participants, although this concept pertaining to medical research was
legally not defined until the 1960s.
PHS discontinued the study only after the press released
accounts in 1972. By this time, only seventy-one subjects were alive. Did the
study, in its historical context, have any scientific value? Many critics
believe that the nature of the experiment was racist and the reasons it was
undertaken in the first place were biased. The uninformed ideas adopted by the
medical profession at the time concerning disease, sex, and African Americans,
served as a faulty rationale for the study.
Moreover, the U.S. Public Health and Service Department's
not providing effective treatment to the subjects and the medical community's
failure to re-assess the scientific value of the experiment during the forty
years it was ongoing raise many concerns about the unethical treatment of
humans deceived into consenting to be subjects of a medical study.
The participants were indeed deceived into taking part in
the study. Told they had "bad blood" and could receive free medical
treatment, rides to the clinic, and meals, one of the goals of the research was
to determine if patients could survive or could live on without treatment,
which at the time the study began, was considered toxic. Basically, the
patients were misled into believing that there was some sort of hope for a
remedy for syphilis at the time and they were to be the first to receive
effective treatment. Instead, to their dismay, they were only there so that the
fatal progression of their disease would be observed. When penicillin became an
effective remedy in the 1940s for this disease, the subjects were still denied
antibiotic therapy in spite of the new developments made toward treating
syphilis.
It is quite alarming how obviously blatant and tactless the
PHS were in viewing syphilis as a disease that solely affected African American
males. The intrinsic racism of the study was never harshly attacked by an
investigatory panel, which never outlined the disturbing fact that the
intention of the PHS was never to provide effective medication to the males
during the course of the study. Even when penicillin was widely available in
the 1950s, there was no re-assessment of the purpose of the study.
One would think that once a cure was found and approved, the
experiment would be a case closed, and the subjects would be treated as regular
patients of a hospital diagnosed with the same medical condition. There would
be no need for another 20 or 30 years of tampering with these lives. Sadly,
this is just one proven example, in a sea of reports, of an organized attempt
to make human experiments seem legitimate in the name of "scientific"
advancement.
~Blog Admin~
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