Unethical Research



Unethical Research

Introduction

Today, protecting human research participants through informed consent is common practice. That was not always the case. Unethical and harmful studies conducted in the past led to the creation of a regulatory board and current ethical principles that are in place to protect the rights of human participants.

The Nazis conducted a great deal of inhuman research during World War II. As a result, in 1947 the Nuremberg Military Tribunal created the Nuremberg Code, which protected human participants in medical experiments. The code required researchers to obtain voluntary consent and minimize harm in experiments that would provide more benefits to the participants than foreseen risks. In 1954, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) established an ethics committee that adopted a policy that required all human participants to provide voluntary informed consent. Furthermore, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare issued regulations in 1974 that called for protection of human research participants. The department would not support any research that was not first reviewed and approved by a committee, which is now known as the Institutional Review Board (IRB). The IRB would be responsible for determining the degree of risk and whether the benefits outweighed any risk to the participants. It was noted in the regulations that informed consent must be obtained.

The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research was created in 1974, and this organization was charged to identify basic ethical principles within research with human subjects and make recommendations to improve the policies in place. As a result, the Belmont Report was created, which identifies and defines the three basic principles for research, and it is still in use today. The basic principles of the Belmont report include respect for persons, beneficence, and justice.

Each norm coexists with the others to ensure participants' safety and should be followed by researchers when formulating and implementing a research project.

Several revisions were made to the ethics code as time progressed. More recently, the Common Rule was created and applied. The Common Rule established the following three main protective factors: review of research by an IRB, institutional assurances of compliance, and informed consent of participants. The Common Rule is also still used today.

Importance of Medical Research

Medicine is not an exact science in the sense that are mathematics or physics. It is subject to many general principles that are globally acceptable, but every patient is different and it is possible that effective treatment for 90% of the population is not for the other 10%. thus, the intrinsic nature of medicine Is it experimental. Even the treatments most commonly recognized to be monitored and evaluated to determine their effective for specific patients or for patients general. This is a function of medical research. Another function, perhaps best known, is the development of new treatments, especially drugs, slides medical and surgical techniques. Much progress has been made ??in this area over the last fifty years and the number of searches now underway has never been ...