Question

In the near future you are working in a clinic and are counseling a elderly patient (65 year old male) that has come to your clinic by the insistence of their adult child. The adult child brought in the patient for a physical. You notice that the patient is not happy to be there and seems very anxious. You ask why and they say it is because they recently read the book Bad Blood and are very concerned coming to you for a wellness visit after hearing about the Tuskegee experiments. In a one page essay explain to the patient (Mr. Smith) the overall details of what events occurred in the Tuskegee experiments and the ways that are in place in a medical setting to make sure that never happens again. (Microbiology)

Answer 1

The US Public Health Service in 1932 started its experiment with the support of the Tuskegee University, a black college in Alabama. They chose 600 poor African Americans in the pretext of helping them with medicine and told them that the study will last for 6 months but extended it to 40 years. The study was supposed study the effects of untreated Syphilis in African American men in Alabama. Out of the 600, 399 people had syphilis but the other 201 didn’t.

This experiment is considered to be very unethical, because they lied to the subjects about the duration of the experiment, the benefits out of the experiment and no treatment was given to people at any point of time for the ‘bad blood’ diseases such as, syphilis, anaemia, and fatigue. This experiment was also considered as a discriminative study as only poor, black men were chosen as the subjects. This resulted in forming Human Research Protection in 1979, which will protect the subjects from any physical or psychological abuse. The highlight of this inhuman and infamous study was that the then President Bill Clinton apologised publicly to the victims.

I would say to Mr. Smith that, the experiment is banned in the USA and Humans need to be treated with respect. No one can harm anyone physically in the name of experiment. People are here to help you lead a happy life and the society has progressed immensely that you don’t need to worry about anything. I’ll help you out with your difficulties and we’ll never harm you physically or conduct any experiment without your consent.