Preview

Summary: The Case Of The Tuskegee Syphilis Study

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
340 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Summary: The Case Of The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
Unlawful Research
Shameika Schmidt
Ultimate Medical Academy
ME1420X: Medical Law & Ethics and Records Management for Billing Specialists
November 2, 2014 Catina Flagg

The Case of the Tuskegee Syphilis Research Study is one of the most gruesome historical cases I’ve read in a long time. For individuals to be screened and monitored under false pretenses while carrying a sexual transmitted disease is beyond unethical and illegal for my taste. This put everyone at risk, especially those already infected without knowledge.
Although it is evident that there are still individuals whom are racist to other races, there are many who are happy to live with peace in all areas of

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Charles Banks, the subject of this appealing biography was a seemingly well-known Black leader, like such as Obama Baraka and Jessie Jackson. Banks status, demeanor, and power were unlimited, way beyond his hometown of Clarksdale and Mound Bayou, Mississippi all-black towns. Born in 1873, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Banks spent most of is life in this well known racially discriminating and violent town. These afflictions of Clarksdale motivated him, so much to the point that he wanted to become an advocate to help his community, in the process he became a successful entrepreneur. This book brilliantly explores the achievement of Banks with proficiency and a clear-cut style.…

    • 660 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    For this week’s assignment I am to discuss ethical principles, specifically the ethical principles that were violated during the research in regards to Henrietta Lacks. Henrietta Lacks was a wife and a mother of five. She was a black tobacco farmer and was a native of rural southern Virginia but a resident of Turner Station in Dundalk, MD. Henrietta had mentioned to family that she had felt a “knot” inside her while pregnant with her fifth child but her family just assumed that it was due to the pregnancy. After giving birth, Henrietta started bleeding abnormally and profusely. Her local doctor tested her for syphilis, which came back negative, and referred to John Hopkins. On January 29, 1951, Lacks went to John Hopkins Hospital. (Zielinski, 2010) Johns Hopkins was her only choice for a hospital because it was the only one nearby that treated black patients. A doctor by the name of Howard W. Jones examined Henrietta and the lump in her cervix. He removed a piece of her tumor without telling her and sent it to pathology. Soon after, Lacks learned she had a malignant epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix. She was treated with radium tube inserts, which were sewn in place. It was during her radiation treatments where they removed two more pieces of her cervix - one healthy and one not - without her permission. The cells from her cervix were given to Dr. George Otto Gey. Dr. Gey “discovered that Henrietta’s cells did something they’d never seen before: They could be kept alive and grow.” (Claiborne & Wright, 2010, "How One Woman's Cells Changed Medicine".) Before this, cells cultured from other cells would only survive for a few days. In fact, up to this point scientists spent more time just trying to keep cells alive than doing actual research on them. However, some cells from Lacks’ tumor sample behaved differently than they had seen before. Gey…

    • 1369 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Tuskegee syphilis study was an experiment conducted by the United States Public Health Service in 1932. The purpose of this study was to determine the natural curse of latent syphilis in Black males who according to this article were prone to this disease. The subjects were chosen by Dr. Raymond Vonderlehr, Vonderlehr was sent to Macon County which was thought to have a large percentage of syphilitic black men to collect a sample of men with latent syphilis. It is mentioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks that “doctors might have actually injected those men with syphilis in order to study them” (Skloot 186). These subjects were mostly sharecroppers and tenant farmer that were mostly illiterate, poorly educated, and between the age of twenty-five and a sixty.…

    • 611 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    consent, while it was a huge benefit to the medical field and mankind, was highly unethical and…

    • 758 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    This introduced one of the first ethical implications in this experiment which was withholding information to gain consent.The USPHS conducted a screening in search of infected participants. After they had chosen the few hundred men to be apart of the experiments they began to moved forward with the study. The doctors lured these men into the study by saying that they were ill and had "bad blood".It was never explained to them why they were really being chosen for this treatment. In order to ensure the interest of the blacks, they began performing noneffective treatments on them such as giving the mercurial ointment. Also, they even used African American health care workers to mislead patients into compliance. These men endured much pain and were enrolled in various treatments without their consent.The second ethical implication was the withholding of treatment. This was the worst charge that the researchers had committed. Even in (year) when penicillin had become the primary treatment for syphilis, this information was also withheld and men were prevented from getting treatment. Though Alabama passed a law in 1927 requiring the reporting and treatment of diseases, the USPHS failed to do so when it came to tending to these…

    • 467 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Us Vs Muskegee Case Study

    • 285 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The impact of United States of America v. Muscogee Public School District has had a profound effect on education. Naturally, school boards are expected to adopt policies to support the academic achievement of every student. With the rise of gang-affiliated activity, mass school shootings and terrorist-related incidents across the country, many school boards adopted strategically planned dress code regulations to manage student behavior, promote conformity, and secure a safe, distraction-free educational learning environment. Standardized dress code initiatives were designed to assimilate a level socio-economic environment and foster a positive climate/culture in which students would feel more comfortable to engage academically. However, regulations…

    • 285 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Governemt testing has been proven to go too far in several cases in the last 100 years. One specific case was the Tuskagee experiment. This experiment by the United States government involved testing of males with the disease syphilis. For over 40 years the US government lied to these patients about what condition they had, and gave them medicine that had no affect on their disease. They did so because they wanted to study the disease in how it affects the body and how it spreads. If they had given the correct treatment it would have save many lives of the tested males, along with their family members that had been affected by the disease. This is just a single example of how governments around the world are given too much power and leniency…

    • 209 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    In 1932, there was a study that was given in Macon County, Alabama by the health department. The study was given to underprivileged African American men who were informed that they have bad blood disease. The health department offered these men health care without being charged to treat their rare blood disorder because by this time this blood disorder was a plague in their county. This study went on for over 40 years by Macon County health department. The health care services were never received by most of the men and the treatments was held back. The Tuskegee syphilis study is one of the most awful immoral human organized studies.…

    • 537 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Tuskegee Study Inhumane

    • 436 Words
    • 2 Pages

    In conclusion, various elements of the Tuskegee study demonstrated unethical research practices. For this reason, countless lives were lost and many others suffered incomparable outcomes. The Tuskegee study proves the importance of conducting ethical research for society and individuals as a…

    • 436 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the past, scientists have done very unwise and unimaginable experiments with humans as the test subject. Like in 1932, the public health service was working to find treatment for syphilis in the african american race.They had 600 black men, 399 with syphilis and 201 that did not have the disease. Without the patient's knowing that they were contracted with syphilis, scientists told the men that they were being treated for “bad blood”. But really they were not given the right treatment to cure their illness. Also in exchange the men received free medical exams, free meals, and burial insurance, which is like life insurance. But in 1968 this research raised concern for peter buxton and others, so they wrote a news article about what these…

    • 617 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Tuskegee experiment 1923, 600 non-prisoners were taken into an experiment with false information. They believed they had ‘bad blood’ which is a word that meant for many illnesses. Out of the 600, 399 were infected with syphilis and 324 of these infected died from being malnourished and not being treated properly. The original experiment was meant to last 6 years, but this expanded into 40 years, ending in the 1970s. In between the 40 years, penicillin was proven to be a treatment for syphilis & the regulations were made. Yet this experiment continued with these 600 men who were falsely informed of what they had. These non-prisoner were aleady msitreated making the possibilities of an actual prisoner being maltreated very…

    • 814 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Tuskegee experiment was yet another demonstration of racial inequalities and dehumanization illustrated by a people who believed in racial superiority. The experiment was unethical and demoralizing from the beginning. The analysis was corrupt and unethical for a plethora of reasons. The experiment disregarded several basic principles of the American Sociological Association’s code of ethics. Perhaps the greatest flaw in the experiment was the intended denial of treatment, which, in turn, directly affected the subject’s safety, violating the code of ‘protecting subjects from personal harm’. ‘Respect the subject’s right to privacy and dignity’ is an additional custom in the code of ethics ignored. The researchers clearly could not even…

    • 785 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was a dark period of time in the United States for medical research. This study was started back in 1932 under the direction of the U.S. Department of Public Health. Two years before the Tuskegee study began, a program was initiated by the PHS (Public Health Service) to diagnose and treat 10,000 African Americans for syphilis is Macon County, Alabama (Munson, p.417). To put the prevalence of syphilis in perspective, “Sampling showed that thirty-five percent of the black population in Macon County was infected with syphilis.” (Munson, p. 417) But, this program was cut short due to the loss of funding. Sometime after this, around 1932, Dr. Taliaferro Clark of the PHS salvaged what he could…

    • 1881 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In 1932, a study called The Tuskegee Syphilis study had just begun in Macon County, Alabama. The study in the beginning had involved a small group of 600 black men, and throughout the time of the study’s existence those numbers would change by either death of individual or an addition of a new black man added to the study. In the study, of those 600 men, an estimated 400 were purposely left unaware of the fact that syphilis infected them and they were not being treated for the disease. The main hypothesis in the study was the study of the natural course of syphilis in black male, and there were no questions asked if this was the study was ethically the right thing to do. This study would go on for about 40 years, and end in 1972 due to being exposed in an article by the Associated Press. The exposure of the study would lead the US government and the medical world down a path of change, those changes deal with patient’s knowledge of the experiment and ethics involved in human experimentation.…

    • 1043 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Medical Apartheid

    • 489 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The radio show concerning the medical apartheid discussed the history of medical “tests” conducted on African Americans from colonial times until present. It is disturbing how much many doctors were able to get away with when inhumanly testing on black people. Even up until the 1970’s it was common practice to conduct medical tests specifically on black people. Medical Apartheid was a disturbing practice in America that many doctors justified by suggesting that these African Americans would not have received any medical care if it were not for their testing. These medical professionals were presented with many ethical questions, however, not ethical dilemmas because the issues with what they were dealing with had a clear right and wrong.…

    • 489 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays