ETHICS

Ethics in Research



Ethics in Research

Introduction

In the early decades of the 20th century before the development of psychiatry medications there were few effective treatments for mental illness. Dr Walter freeman was an idealistic doctor hungry for fame who would champion one of the century's most infamous medical procedures called lobotomy. He wanted to solve the problem of psychiatry.

Was Lobotomy A health innovation Or A Monstrous Mistake?

For freeman shock treatments verified that mental sickness produced from a defect somewhere in the mind and he liked to be the one to find it. Dr Freeman will be influenced by a Portuguese neurologist Dr Egas Moniz who believed that surgically altering the frontal lobes will change patient's behaviors.

Dr Freeman will team up with a neurosurgeon Dr James watts and attempt their first procedure on a living patient and will call it a success. Together they will perform a few lobotomies together then because of expenses Dr Freeman will turn to the operation itself. With the use of an ice pick as an instrument Dr Freeman will perform hundreds and hundreds of lobotomy by simply put in an ice pick above the eyeball and in the plain of the nose and with the tap of a hammer will reach the prefrontal area. Dr Freeman will tour the country he will go to john Hopkins, mayo clinic and other elite medical institutions to perform lobotomy on general population around the country.

By decade's end lobotomy had won the acceptance of mainstream medicine by being the solution for thousands of patients because option of staying in hospital for 20-40 years was not acceptable. Some of the patients became disabled, some were in a vegetative state, and some were acting like children and some patient dye during the procedure.

The Deadly Deception: The Tuskegee Syphilis Study

In 1932 the public health services working with the Tuskegee Institute began a study to record the natural history of syphilis in hopes of justifying treatment programs for blacks. It was called the Tuskegee study of untreated Syphilis in the Negro male. The study was meant to discover how syphilis blacks as opposed to whites (Braslow, 1997).

The study initially involved 600 black men, 399 with syphilis and 201 who did not have the disease. The study was conducted without the benefit of patient informed consent. Researchers told the men they were being treated for bad blood a local period utilised to describe some ailments including syphilis anemia and fatigue. In truth they did not obtain the correct remedy needed to therapy their illness. In exchange for taking part in the study the men received free health exams free repasts and burial insurance. Although originally projected to last 6 months the study actually went on for 40 years.

The men were never granted ample remedy for their disease even when penicillin became the pharmaceutical of alternative for syphilis in 1947 researcher did not offer it to the subjects. There was no clues that researchers had acquainted them of the study or its real ...