Human Experimentataion Abuses Continue

Human Experimentation Abuses Continue

Reviewer Ludmerer says, "the ethical problems in medical research pertain not to race alone but to the power relations of scientific medicine." He mentions "immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and others [...] even medical students," [and] the powerless and voiceless, whoever they might be." (Kenneth M. Ludmerer, "Mad science," Boston Globe, January 21, 2007)
Most prominent of the "other" category are mental patients. Chief psychiatrists and Presidents of the APA openly promote using in-patients for medical research. They say the patients have lucid moments when they are capable of giving informed consent. When they are outpatients they are ignored as unworthy of human status. This is today not 100 years ago.
Why are persons accused of this disability marginalized by journalists, politicians and human rights ethicists today? Public school students continue to be a easy source of human subjects, with or without consent. The administrators see an opportunity to free up teacher time, and give access to the students to psychiatric researchers. This is an abuse that is seldom addressed or recognized as such.

-- Roy Bercaw, Editor
ENOUGH ROOM
Cambridge MA USA

Mad science A horrifying catalog of the centuries-long medical exploitation of African-Americans
By Kenneth M. Ludmerer
Boston Globe
January 21, 2007

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present By Harriet A. Washington Doubleday, 501 pp., illustrated, $27.95

I vividly remember how I was taught to perform a rectal examination as a second-year medical student in the early 1970s. Our instructor, a respected surgeon, described the technique to a group of eight of us, then took us to a surgical ward to perform the examination for the first time. He found a middle-aged black man, whom he then ordered to submit to examinations from all eight of us.
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