Preview

The Tuskegee Report: Why Does Being Black Affect The Way Patients

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1426 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Tuskegee Report: Why Does Being Black Affect The Way Patients
Why does being black affect the way doctors see you and treat you as a patient The Tuskegee Report is a perfect example, yes the patients were informed with some things but not everything. African Americans were informed that they will get free healthcare, free meals,and free burial insurance. The patients were told that the experiment would only last for six months but it lasted for 40 years instead. The Tuskegee Report goes back to my question which is how far has the treatment African Americans has improved from today than to how they got treated back in the 20’s when Henrietta Lacks was born. In the book it describes how a hospital was built for African Americans who couldn’t afford to go to the general hospital or for those who wouldn’t …show more content…
Yes things have changed over the past 40 years but how much of a change has happened. Which leads to this question why does being black affect the way patients are treated and/or helped. “If you are African-American and you present to the emergency room with a broken leg or a kidney stone, for example, you’re less likely to be given analgesics at the recommended level”. Not only do patients have to wait longer in emergency rooms, but they also don’t get everything they need to get at a high level like other patience would get. For example being recommended for a specialist some patients would get the low end doctor rather than getting the top notch doctor for that specific category. We found that doctors, when they went in to see the black versus other patients, they made the same treatment decisions, they said the same things with their voices but would do small gestures that were different. “For example, they would use more closed posture and they had their arms crossed, or had their hands in their pockets. They would stand further away from the bed,” Barnato says. “They would spend more time looking at the nurse or the monitor and less time looking at the patient. Black and latino patients have noticed that some doctors are afraid to be in the same room with them. This results has to do with how American history has described how “violent” blacks have been known to be or that they …show more content…
The Tuskegee report would have changed the way Henrietta lacks was treated after her death because of how much change we as whole ( America) have done to treat every patient the same it may not be turned around 100 percent but having a certain percentage change than having nothing change is a big of an improvement. The lacks family had gone through so much because of their race which happened to be black, they were also judged because of the community they live in and the education henrietta had gotten. Going back to the book there was a reason why that hospital was built because back in the 30’s, 40’s etc… black patients couldn’t either afford to go to that certain hospital or the hospital employees wouldn’t treat the black patients and tell them to leave. The hospital that was built for that community was huge because even though at that time period the people in that community didn’t know but that hospital was a new chapter for a black community like there’s it wasn’t the best chapter but it was a start to something new for them. The prisoners that were injected with the deadly disease had no idea of everything else they were being injected because the doctors chose not to tel them and lie to them to not make them worry. This situation is similar to the tuskegee report because both patients and inmates were injected with deadly diseases and they both weren’t informed with situations

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    The book BAD BLOOD: THE TUSKEGEE SYPHILIS EXPERIMENT by James H. Jones was a very powerful compilation of years of astounding research, numerous interviews, and some very interesting positions on the ethical and moral issues associated with the study of human beings under the Public Health Service (PHS). "The Tuskegee study had nothing to do with treatment … it was a nontherapeutic experiment, aimed at compiling data on the effects of the spontaneous evolution of syphilis in black males" (Jones pg. 2). Jones is very opinionated throughout the book; however, he carefully documents the foundation of those opinions with quotes from letters and medical journals. The book allowed the reader to see the experiment from different viewpoints. This was remarkable because of the initial feelings the reader has when first hearing of the experiment. In the beginning of the book, the reader will see clearly there has been wrong doing in this experiment, but somehow, Jones will transform you into asking yourself, "How could this happen for so long?"…

    • 1703 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Medical Apartheid

    • 521 Words
    • 3 Pages

    In the book, Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington touches on some major soft points, that really made me think and I believe that if many other people read this they would be surprised as well, because when she goes into detail about the cruel treating of African Americans in the past, it is just shocking to find out what we didn’t know. Basically, Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. It begins with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it talks about the way that both, slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge, a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the present times, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions. It also talked about the Tuskegee Experiment which was the most shocking out of all of it. The Tuskegee Experiment was a study that began in 1932; Investigators enrolled in the study 399 impoverished African-American sharecroppers from Macon County, Ala., infected with syphilis. For participating in the study, the men were given free medical exams, free meals and free burial insurance. They were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it. According to the book, Medical Apartheid, the men were told they were being treated for…

    • 521 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Tuskegee Experiment

    • 2455 Words
    • 10 Pages

    In 1932, in the area surrounding Tuskegee, Macon County, Alabama, the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Rosenwald Foundation began a survey and small treatment program for African-Americans with syphilis. Within a few months, the deepening depression, the lack of funds from the foundation, and the large number of untreated cases provied the government’s reseachers with what seemed to be an unprecedented opportunity to study a seemingly almost “natural” experimentation of lantent syphilis in African-American men. What had begun as a “treatment” program thus was converted by the PHS reasearchers, under the imprimatur of the Surgeon General and with knowledge and consent of the Prewsident of Tuskegee Institute, the medical director of the Institute’s John A. Andrew Hospital, and the Macon County public health officials, into a persecpective study-The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (Jones1-15). Moreover, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which began in 1932 and was terminated in 1972 by the protest of an enraged public, constituted the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history. Since the premise on which the experiment was based did not involve finding a cure or providing treatment, the question then remains why did the study begin and why was it continued for four decades?…

    • 2455 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    This essay examines the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, wherein for 40 years (1932-1972) hundreds of black men suffering from advanced syphilis were studied but not treated. The 40-year study was controversial for reasons related to ethical standards; primarily because researchers knowingly failed to treat patients appropriately after the 1940s validation of penicillin as an effective cure for the disease they were studying. To explore the role of the racism in the controversial study, this essay analyzes the article written by Allan M. Brandt.…

    • 1079 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    This essay discusses the medical experiments which were conducted by the United States Public Health Service between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee Alabama. 399 African -American adult male subjects were examined and diagnosed as having late stage syphilis. The main goal of the study was to periodically examine these men to determine how their bodies were affected by the syphilis disease. The thesis of this essay is that based on moral and ethical grounds, the Tuskegee experiments were indefensible.…

    • 781 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Tuskegee Experiment

    • 2908 Words
    • 9 Pages

    The original study of the Tuskegee research was a disreputable medical experiment carried out in the United States between 1932 and 1972, in which almost 400 black Americans with syphilis were offered no medical treatment, allowing researchers to see the course of the disease. The events of the Tuskegee research triggered extensive values of legislation, including the National Research Act, and the experiment attracted a great deal of public attention. Many people regard the Tuskegee Experiment as an extremely shameful event in American history, and several organizations including the Centers for Disease Control have extensive archives on the experiment which are available to interested members of the public who want to learn more about it.…

    • 2908 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    People of color are receiving special attention in medical, social, and political literature due to disparities in health status. In recent years, evidence has shown a relationship between race/ethnicity and health disparities among the U.S. population. If racial and ethnic disparities in health are not addressed, demographic…

    • 982 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Tuskegee Syphilis Study

    • 856 Words
    • 4 Pages

    How can one live with themselves conducting experiments that were unjustified on both moral and ethical grounds, in which human beings were used a guinea pigs back in the twentieth century?…

    • 856 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Today, healthcare has advanced through extreme procedures in the past that the United States government will never get to make-up for. Innocents were tortured in hopes that they were leading towards finding a cure for their diseases. The Tuskegee Experiment is one of the first documented experiments in the United States that fully admits to the wrong doings they performed to African Americans in their program. The Tuskegee Experiment was, by definition, the same as a clinical trial in today’s society, but that changed quickly. In 1932, the United States told nearly 400 African Americans that they would get free treatment for their disease.…

    • 800 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status are used to characterize health disparities globally. Thirty years ago, the Health and Human Services Secretary, Margaret M. Heckler, created a taskforce to examine health concerns of Blacks and other minority populations in the United States 1. The Heckler Report advocated for changes in the Federal Government’s approach to addressing health disparities. Following dissemination of the Heckler Report, a number of books, manuscripts, and policies were published to bring attention to a systemic lack in health equity among physicians across the U.S.. Lack of health equity ultimately leads to unequal treatment of diverse patients and contributes to the growing disparities seen in national health. In response to these growing disparities, in 2002, the Kaiser Family Foundation examined physicians’ perceptions of disparities and noted that physician gender and race had an impact on whether the physician believed that disparities…

    • 292 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    On November 11th, 2004, NitroMed, a Massachusetts based pharmaceutical company published a study on the effects of a new drug called BiDil in treating heart failure among African Americans in the New England Journal of Medicine (Taylor 2049). Since announcing the study, NitroMed's research has sparked controversy surrounding the ethical implications and scientific evidence of race-based medicine. This study marks a breakthrough in race-based drug treatments as the first pharmaceutical ever researched, endorsed and targeted for a single ethnic group (Pollack 1). The racially-specific pharmaceutical initiative is a product of tremendous government funding allotted by the Clinton administration to the Human Genome Project at the turn of the millennium. Since then, much medical research has focused on understanding the human genome in search of genetic explanations for health problems while funding and interest have decreased in social-related health research and medical programs for poor and underserved populations (Braun 162).…

    • 4392 Words
    • 18 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Vivien Thomas helped to change this also because he was black he impacted how people looked at black people. He showed them that he was just as smart and talented as any white doctor.…

    • 435 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The connection between race and the medical industry has negatively affected minorities for years. The medical industry is not innocent in the fact of exploiting poor people and minorities. Many of the men who chose to participate in the experiment did so under the guise of free healthcare. This represents the social contract theory, the subjects of this experiment expected the controllers to uphold their end of the verbal agreement. To this very day there are occurrences where a doctor may refuse treatment to a person solely on his biased perceptions of their race. I feel that these matters are handled somewhat swiftly and appropriately. I remember reading about the black woman who dies from cervical cancer due to Johnson &Johnson baby powder. Her family won the civil suit and was paid millions, she did however succumb to her illness and died but, most importantly the case made them accountable and they changed their labeling to warn people of the potential of…

    • 612 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Initially when I began reading the first article written by Esposito (2016), I immediately noticed a theme which resonated throughout the entire article. The health care industry has been presented with a difficult conundrum where people are recognizing the lack of diversity in the industry. According to Esposito (2016), “Boosting the diversity of providers in the U.S. health care industry could be a tool for bridging the gap” (n.p.) There seems to be a lack of African-America health professionals spanning across the health industry, which concerns one of the board members of the Association of Black Health Professionals. Discrimination in the health care system is prevalent, whether or not people realize the reality of the situation. This…

    • 714 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Best Essays

    Infant Mortality Proposal

    • 3481 Words
    • 14 Pages

    Thomas, K. K. (2006). The Hill-Burton act and civil rights: Expanding hospital care for Black Southerners. The Journal of Southern History, 72(4), 823-870.…

    • 3481 Words
    • 14 Pages
    Best Essays