Medical Torture - Research Paper Example

? Medical Torture 14 May Introduction The path to medical knowledge often takes a tortuous route (no pun intended). In the ancient times, emperors and kings utilized their own subjects for medical experiments to gain new knowledge in medicines and treatments. The practice included using prisoners to force them to take an herbal plant concoction to test whether it is poisonous or not. There were no medical ethics back then and it was considered to be more important in the wider search for knowledge to sacrifice just one life in order to gain something. This was essentially the same debate that existed in Britain during the nineteenth century on vivisections (Miller 334). If the prisoner dies from taking the herb medicine, then that herb plant or its active ingredients can be eliminated from the list of possible medicinal drugs from the list kept by the imperial doctors. If the prisoner gets well, then that herbal concoction gets examined for its other healing properties and included in that precious list. Ancient Chinese medicine could be cited here as an example of medical practices that may have bordered on the unethical if it is considered within today’s stricter context in bio-ethics. Acupuncturists could not gain much knowledge about the human body without using live humans as experimental subjects. There are obvious advantages to using live human subjects in medical experiments. A need to examine the effects of certain drugs or surgical procedures on live subjects gives the immediate feedback that has great importance on the search for medical knowledge. The field of medical science did not cringe from using live animals for experiments, such as monkeys and rats, until these practices were banned only recently for humanitarian reasons. Discussion China was not alone in the ancient world in its search for cures of human ailments. Other ancient civilizations such as those in Iraq, Egypt and Persia also contributed to the accumulation of human medical knowledge. The search for a cure can be considered as the corollary to a much deeper search – the search for the fountain of youth and immortality. In ancient Chinese traditional medicine, emperors constantly consulted with their sage doctors or physicians regarding such topics as pathology, diagnostics, acupuncture and moxibution. The ancient priests of Egypt succeeded in developing the lost medical art of mummification in their quest for immortality and in building the pyramids to house their mummies. In ancient China, these sage physicians and erudite teachers discussed medicine in the wider context of the overall Chinese culture to encompass other areas of knowledge such as cosmology, astronomy, geography, military science, philosophy and divination (Galambos 1). It can be said that the search for medical answers to some of the most baffling diseases like cancer continues today. Although medical professionals are expected to adhere to the ancient oath of Hippocrates, there are a few rogue elements that will resort to shortcuts and unethical methods to obtain their research. This is especially tempting to people who have illusions of grandeur, such as being the first to discover the cure for cancer, as an example. A more recent experience with medical experimentation was that of Nazi Germany in which prisoners were used in experiments, sometimes without the use of anesthesia, to test the limits of human endurance and tolerance for pain. Their use of live humans was founded on the false science of eugenics based on heredity and Darwin’s theory of evolution. Famous people were captivated by an allure of eugenics (literally, good genes) like Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes among others, to include US presidents Roosevelt and Wilson. It was a by-product of the Progressive Movement to attain social progress (Winfield 59). Eugenics apparently lost favor because of those inhuman and unauthorized series of experiments which even some medical scientists found to be revolting. The practice of the false theories of eugenics had started innocently enough, such as the experiments on ways to find a cure for some incurable diseases or hereditary ailments such as hemophilia and sickle cell disease. It had always toyed with the idea of creating a master race through the use of selective breeding in creating “designer babies” with good physical features and high levels of intelligence. The original aims of adopting eugenics was for reasons of public health such as promotion of healthy diets and improved nutrition; it was used also to prevent the spread of some communicable diseases like tuberculosis (Engs 18). With the adoption of stricter medical research ethics, there is enough reason to believe that some unethical practices persist but these had probably gone underground. This paper is an argument that these adverse medical practices still continue right under our noses in such areas as prisons, mental institutions and other not so obvious places like remote rural areas. A common thread among these illegal experiments is the lack of obtaining informed consent. In many instances, people are not informed properly that they were taking part in experiments. There had been several instances of these practices which just recently came to light. Incredibly, some of these experiments were done by the United States government. A good example was the US experiment dating back to the period 1946-1948 when about 700 Guatemala citizens were deliberately infected with syphilis in order to test the new penicillin (McNeil 1). The research subjects were Guatemalan prisoners, mental patients and soldiers. This experiment was the precursor to the infamous Tuskegee medical study in which blacks with diseases like syphilis were intentionally left untreated for decades to see the progression and outcome of the disease under the direction of Dr. John C. Cutler. Results from laboratory experiments on rabbits and monkeys were inconclusive, so humans were used. The clearly unethical experiments were discovered only recently and were the apex of abhorrent research practices now considered as crimes against humanity. Those Guatemala experiments were extremely bad for two good reasons: the people used were not informed of the deliberate infections done on them and secondly, there was also deception in the use of human subjects. Putting people at risk in experiments is clearly against medical ethics and apparently, there were other similar experiments such as infecting retarded children with the hepatitis virus and another experiment of elderly patients injected with cancer cells (ibid.). There are certainly other experiments which the world does not know about at all. The use of Guatemalan subjects is a case of a developed country using the subjects of a developing country to conducts its experiments which cannot be done domestically. There are also cases where new vaccines are being tried out on unsuspecting subjects. An insidious form of medical torture is the use of psychotic drugs administered by licensed psychiatrists to gain information from dissidents (Peel & Iacopino 71). Mental institutions in former Soviet states used this method extensively through the ostensible alibi of diagnosing those who are “mentally-ill” based on their definition and used psychotropic drugs that alter the perception, behavior, mood and consciousness of a detained patient. American soldiers who got captured by the Vietcong of communist North Vietnam were subjected to mental and physical torture resulting in the coined term of “brainwashing” and perfected by North Korea too. Detainees in various non-democratic countries form the most vulnerable and easiest to use group of human subjects for medical experimentation because they have no recourse. The experiments done in Nazi concentration camps and Japanese-held territories during Second World War were testaments to the use of prisoners in extensive military medical research. The use of political detainees is often a very convenient way of procuring research subjects. These people have no way to offer resistance if they do not want to participate in such programs. Many unauthorized medical experiments can be considered as the equivalent of the modern and broader definition of torture which is the deliberate inflicting of human pain or suffering to obtain information. Members of the medical profession are expressly prohibited from participating in any form of torture by not only avoiding but taking active steps to also prevent it from happening. Amnesty International had organized doctors to protest against it and this resulted into the Tokyo Declaration by the World Medical Association condemning doctors who participate in state-sponsored medical torture (Rejali 399). Despite these avowed declarations of non-participation in torture in the name of medical research, one can never be sure it is not happening in some obscure laboratory in a remote county. There is always a rogue medical researcher who is either mentally-deranged or simply just curious enough to learn the limits of human reactions to such painful experiences as very low temperatures, toxic chemicals, noxious gases, electric shocks, starvation, amputations, the use of germs and other biological agents, radiation, forced sterilizations and euthanasia. Maybe today’s medical torture experiments are done with more finesse so as not to leave any marks on a torture victim but the objectives have largely remained the same and it is to obtain crucial medical information not otherwise possible if voluntary consent is required first. The use of deception and subterfuge is now more commonly used to avoid any possible liabilities. There could be cases of humans used as guinea pigs such as exposing them to radiation. The term medical torture could be applied to very subtle means of obtaining medical information even on some unwitting subjects who had earlier given their informed consent. In some instances, doctors know administering a new chemotherapy drug could be painful and with potential severe side effects but they still go ahead with the treatment protocol so they could learn some more on the efficacy of a new drug formulation. The torture techniques of today are referred to as “clean” because these leave no long-lasting physical marks. Conclusion Medical personnel are sometimes used clandestinely in torture sessions not only to obtain information about medical research and add to the world’s knowledge but also to help determine the limits of human endurance. This is quite necessary in some instances such as the use of aggressive or enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT) from terrorism suspects to obtain vital information but without killing the tortured subjects. Medical information is also needed to know where the most painful points in the human body are located so this can be utilized to inflict maximum pain without leaving any marks that can cause a media scandal. Waterboarding or simulated drowning is one of the most effective torture techniques around although there are also other effective torture methods which are equally powerful such as sleep deprivation, stress positions, prolonged isolation, loud noise and continued darkness. The information gained from such tortures with the aid of medical professionals is often used to refine and enhance the subsequent torture techniques to obtain maximum pain. Medical monitoring is needed to prevent mental and physical thresholds from being crossed. Ice, water, noise, psychedelic drugs and stress positions have replaced electric shocks as the torture method of choice because they are proven to be equally effective. In modern ghettos, medical torture could be in the form of unproven experimental vaccines that can cause pain or even death without informing participants. Other instances could be supposed treatments for drug addicts who may unwittingly imbibe a new drug to counter withdrawal symptoms. Addicts in inner-city slums are very vulnerable since medical researchers may not fully make documentations about their experiments and consider these subjects as “trash” anyway and would die whether given these treatments or not. Society would not care a whit if the people die as a result and in some instances might be happy or even thankful for having rid of them. Medical research has ironically been used to disguise the effects of torture (Peters 175). Works Cited Engs, Ruth C. The Progressive Era’s Health Reform Movement: A Historical Dictionary. Westport, CT, USA: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003. Print. Galambos, Imre. “The Origins of Chinese Medicine.” 1996. Web. 08 May 2011 McNeil, Donald G. Jr. “U.S. Apologizes for Syphilis Tests in Guatemala.” The New York Times, 1 October 2010. Web. 10 May 2011. Miller, Ian. “Necessary Torture? Vivisection, Suffragette Force-feeding and Responses to Scientific Medicine in Britain c. 1870-1920.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 6.3 (2009): 333-372. Print. Peel, Michael and Vincent Iacopino. The Medical Documentation of Torture. London, UK: Greenwich Medical Media Limited, 2002. Print. Peters, Edward. Torture. Philadelphia, PA, USA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. Print. Rejali, Darius. Torture and Democracy. Princeton, NJ, USA : Princeton University Press, 2009. Print. Winfield, Ann Gibson. Eugenics and Education in America: Institutionalized Racism and the Implications of History, Ideology and Memory. NY, USA: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. 2007. Print. Read More