The Medical Exploitation - Essay Example

 An example of medical apartheid is Ebb Cade’s case. After involving himself in a truck accident, he was admitted to a military hospital in Oak Ridge. His bones were fractured to the extent that nobody thought that he was going to survive. Joseph Howland, a military physician took advantage of Ebb’s condition and decided to use him as a human experiment. He injected him with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium- forty-one times normal lifetime exposure. After five days, they extracted bone chips before setting his bones. In addition to that, they clipped fifteen of his teeth to be subjected to study. However, after gaining a little strength, he sneaked from the clinic. The doctors were extremely disappointed with his disappearance. Their primary purpose was not to treat him but to experimentally calibrate the physiological devastation of plutonium. Cade returned to his home in Greensboro, where he died of a heart disease unrelated to his plutonium injection eight years later.

Elmer Allen was also another innocent patient who suffered plutonium injections from government doctors. After falling from a train and fracturing his leg, he was dismissed from his job. With little pay and meager savings, he could not afford quality medical services. He went from one doctor to another. After one year of pain, his knee was swollen three times its normal size. This compelled him to visit the University of California-San Francisco's (UCSF) free clinic where he was diagnosed with chondrosarcoma, cancer of the bone. He was then injected with plutonium-238, a more radioactive isotope than plutonium 239 given to a majority of patients. His leg was later amputated. The truth came later came out that the clinic’s physicians injected his leg with plutonium without his consent with the aim of amputating his leg to use it in their research.