Paper on movie and Belmont study. Health, Medicine, Nursing Essay

Tuskegee Study
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Medical morality is supposed to bring up a healing relationship between the patient and the physician. That is why it is considered a moral and ethical endeavor with clear convictions of right and wrong. However, this has not always the case. One of the most controversial cases of ethical malpractice happened between 1932 and 1972, infamously known as the Tuskegee experiment. The study was conducted by the United States Public Health Service designed to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis. Based at Tuskegee University, a historically black college, the test subjects consisted solely of negro males. They were only told that the study was free medical healthcare from the federal government and that was the first major violation of ethical standards. This essay is a personal reflection on the Tuskegee study and analysis on what ethical practices got violated with reference from the film Miss Ever Boys and The Belmont Report & Nuremberg Code.
No, it is not necessarily unethical for a study to not offer available medical treatment for a debilitating disease. The fact that the study included it in the requirements to be part of the study means that they provided informed consent in that regard. In normal medical practice, it is an ethical violation to turn down a patient with a debilitating disease. The diseases have no cure but there are medications and treatments that the patient can be put through to help them cope with the illness. However, the Tuskegee experiment was a study and not a medical practice. It is important to note that there is a difference between biomedical and behavioral research. There is a thin line between them because both activities tend to happen simultaneously or due to medical practice adopting new procedures that deviate from standards of practice which in that case they are labeled as experimental CITATION Far12 \l 1033 (Timimi, 2012).
The term practice refers to the medical interventions, diagnosis, treatment, and therapy carried out to ensure the wellbeing of a patient. For a study, it is designed to test a hypothesis and to draw conclusions. CITATION POw95 \l 1033 (Owen, 1995) Experimental procedures should also be recommended for formal research before being conducted to ensure that they are safe and effective. The ethical violation in practice that took place was the refusal of white hospitals to treat black men in Alabama at a time the disease was at its peak. The Tuskegee study was proposed by Dr. Douglas (Craig Sheffer) as a solution to help the black men in Alabama. Therefore, failing to treat debilitating disease was not unethical because the whole study was designed to find a cure for syphilis. The funding was also not enough as the study took years which was more time than the expected six months. Therefore, there was no way they had the resources to treat any other disease apart from syphilis.
The human subjects for the study did not know that they were part of an experiment. They were African American males seeking treatment and the United States government decided to use them as guinea pigs. They thought that they were getting direct treatment for syphilis when in reality, they were being given fake tre...