Medical practice has made significant progress in combating many healthcare challenges. One of the ways this has been achieved is through research that determines symptoms, effects of diseases and remedies to the ailments. In most of these cases, physicians and researchers use human beings for their investigations, and this may raise ethical concerns. Research ethics arise from the selection of participants, acquiring consent, goals of the research and the welfare of those being studied.
Experiment That Shaped Ethical Codes and Regulations
Between the year 1932 and 1972 in Macon County, Alabama, USA, clinical research named Tuskegee Syphilis Study was conducted on 600 African-American men. Four hundred men in that men were infected with syphilis while 200 were not infected thus acting as the control group (Ogungbure, 2011). The study aimed to find out how long one can live with untreated syphilis and if blacks reacted to syphilis in the same way whites did. The experiment was initially set to go for six months but ended up lasting for 40 years. There were two main violations in this experiment; first, the researchers used deceitful means to obtain consent from participants and secondly; they withheld treatment from these individuals considering that they may have been treated. Francis (2013) argues that in the mid-1940s, penicillin had been discovered to be a standard cure for syphilis.
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Outcomes Associated with the Study
Because of this study, the legislature strengthened guidelines meant to protect humans who are subjects in the research. The legislation required that all research on humans that are federally-funded should go through the Institutional Review Board (Feelay, 2017). A lawsuit filed by a civil rights attorney resulted in the victims and their families receiving an out-of-court $ 10 million compensation.
Consents that would have Made the Study Ethical
The men should have been informed that they had sexually transmitted disease and based on that they would have decided to participate willingly or not participate in the study. Additionally, the study should have sought the consent of the individuals to be treated once the six months duration of the study was completed instead of lying that they were receiving free care.
References
Feeley, M. (2017). Legality, social research, and the challenge of institutional review boards. In Crime, Law and Society (pp. 55-74). Routledge.
Francis, A. M. (2013). The wages of sin: how the discovery of penicillin reshaped modern sexuality. Archives of Sexual Behavior , 42 (1), 5-13.
Ogungbure, A. A. (2011). The Tuskegee syphilis study: Some ethical reflections. Thought and Practice , 3 (2), 75-92.
