Bad Medicine

WWII brought with it experimentation.

An excuse. Sadly I am not at all surprised by the thought process at them time. They were prisoners, why shouldn't they use them. They were the very people that, if released, wouldn't hesitate to kill them.

At the same time, I find myself to be ashamed of the situation as a whole. Who would have thought so many advances would have come from this time period because of the thought process. A time where "doctors and scientists looked for areas where 'informed consent' could be manipulated."

The corruption with in the United States prison astonishes me. They might not be innocent, but they are still people. It's sick to think that doctors that are supposed to be helping these people instead take advantage of the fact that they are helpless and easy to observe for their own personal gains.

The comparison of humans to chimpanzees show how the doctors value human life and the dehumanization that was occurring on American soil. Much like that of the Nazi doctors. Not only that, but the price at which these prisoners are willing to sell themselves for is sad. A pack of cigarettes could bribe a man into selling his body to "science."

The reasoning found by doctors in America, seems to run parallel to that of the Nazi doctors. "... Prisoners remained ... vulnerable to promises of remission which quite overwhelmed rational judgement in much he same way that a threat would."

I think they went to far, especially with testing on children and the mentally handicapped. I can't believe that they would think that would be okay, where were the parents? This doesn't make sense to me. Even worse, where were the parents of these poor innocent babies? Especially the mentally handicapped babies. What kind of parent would allow for their children to be injected with radioactive materials? That's just sick!

The lack of professionalism within these studies confuses me. If the doctors justification is that they are gaining knowledge and furthering science, then why omit the deaths and the negatives of these experiments. If throwing away their findings and pretending like they never happened, how then are they to learn and further science?

I can't understand how the public could be okay and turn the other way when it came to experiments that were hurting people and harming others. But with this, they start caring, and want to put a stop to it when they were being lied to. Don't get me wrong I'm happy that they aren't allowed to withhold information, but I find it to be a little sickening that so many people at the time, and possibly even now, could have let this kind of thing continue on for so long.

Humans are not guinea-pigs.