Issues in Healthcare Ethics The Tuskegee Experiment

Issues in Healthcare Ethics
Name
Institution
Issues in Healthcare Ethics
Introduction
Healthcare ethics provide caregivers with proper frameworks of making medical decisions in instances where they are faced with complex issues involving their clients. Barber (2016) enumerates the four requirements of healthcare ethics as autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice. The ethics of autonomy offers the clients the legal privilege to retain the rights of controlling their bodies. As a result, a physician is only allowed to give suggestions and advise and not to coerce or influence the client towards making decisions. On the other hand, beneficence is described by Lategan and van Zyl (2016) as a code of medical ethics that gives physicians the integral responsibility of ensuring that they initiate proper mechanisms of benefiting their patients at any time. Therefore, all clinical methods and procedures adopted in a clinical process must be tailored towards benefiting the patient. Comparatively, non-maleficence is defined as a principle that obliges practitioners to ensure that the decisions they undertake do not harm other members of the community even in instances where such resolutions may avail utmost gains to the patient under consideration. Lastly, the principle of justice is based on the premise that all medical decisions must reveal an element if fairness. The current study seeks to underscore the extents to which the principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice were violated or adhered to in the Tuskegee experiment, the Henrietta lacks and the development of the HeLa cell line as well as the Nazi medical experiments.
The Tuskegee Experiment
The Tuskegee experiments that incorporated 400 untreated male black Americans infected with syphilis is considered by Miranda Jr and Sanchez (2014) as a proceeding that imposed great violations to the ethical regulations of medical practice. In this historical study, all the rules of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice were violated. The point that the subjects were encouraged to take part in the experiment with the promise that they would receive free specialized treatments reveals an aspect of coercion and persuasion to engage in the study without personal will; an aspect that violated the norm of autonomy.
Beneficence is an ethical norm that gives practitioners the obligation of ensuring that all procedures put in place benefit the patient. Miranda Jr and Sanchez (2014) explain that in the Tuskegee experiment, patients were subjected to a heavy metals therapy which was ineffective in fostering the treatment of syphilis. The inability of the physicians to administer the right medication left over 100 people dead. On the other hand, the rule of non-maleficence gives practitioners the obligation of ensuring that the procedures undertaken do not cause harm to the clients. The fact that the Tuskegee patients were denied proper treatment such as penicillin reveals how this rule was violated. Lastly, the treatments administered were not just. According to Paul and Brooks (2015), penicillin treatment was upheld despite the fact that it was considered to be the most effective remedy for syphilis.
The Nazi Medical Experimentations
Th...