Ethical Progress, or lack there of?

Both the international “Declaration of Helsinki” and “The Belmont Report” dictate that a physician may also play the role of researcher so long as that the two roles do not intertwine and that their patient’s best interest are still in mind. Many choose take both of these roles on but how many of them do so ethically? An old article in Time summarizes a Dr. Beecher’s review in the New England Journal Of Medicine of the atrocities in medical research at the time. He states that to most patients the full extent of the research was not explained, in other words, true informed consent was not obtained. In other cases, many patients did not know that they were research test subjects at all. Cases summarized include denial of medication to see the effects of a disease, melanoma cancer transplants to healthy patients, and removal of questionable organs to see if they truly served a function in the body, all on the pretense of benefiting the patient. The case of melanoma was supposed to provide the sick patient with antibodies from her mother, the person to whom the cancer was transplanted, but in the end both patients died from the cancer.

The question is, how far have we really come in the year 2008? Is this still an issue or have ethical boards reformed the practice of medical research to no longer include such problems? Unfortunately, we all know that the answer to this question is not the shining moment in human history. Ethical boards still exist that consistently make sure a doctor’s judgment is truly what is best for the patient and even with that, mishaps still occur, people are taken advantage of, and ethical debate on the topic continues. We still have miles to go before we reach a happy median between medical research and ethical righteousness.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,835950-2,00.html