7 thoughts on “Interesting Article Related to Class. Any Thoughts?

  1. I thought the comment by Dr. Suba was ridiculous; if the “women in the unscreened control groups had been told the simple truth that cervical screening would lower their risk of death from cancer, they would have left the control groups and sought screening on their own, thereby nullifying a scientifically defective experimental design.” This it the problem itself- there was no need to have a control group for this experiment since we KNOW that cervical cancer screening already decreases the risk of dying from cervical cancer. Most medical experiments like this inform the participants fully, so there aren’t any legal/ethical problems. Additionally, they always test a new treatment beside a well-known treatment. This is all that is needed to determine the efficacy of the new treatment. It was a true violation of physician moral code to keep 140,000 women ill-informed. This kind of ethical problem has already been defined as a violation and organizations have made guidelines for how to go about these studies. The doctor chose to ignore these guidelines and in turn, violated the rights of 140,000 Indian women. The one thing that boggles my mind most is that it took so long for this study to cause an uproar. If it had happened in the states… it would’ve caused a major backlash.

  2. I truly have a problem with this study as they clearly did not take the potential serious repercussions into account. When people’s lives are at stake, it is inhumane to treat them as scientific experiments, no matter what potential good can result. As the article states, it violated the following guidelines: “the benefits, risks, burdens and effectiveness of a new intervention must be tested against those of the best current proven intervention.” In my opinion, it seems like there was a huge lapse in moral judgement. In other words, there was a lack of consideration for the women that were participating in this study, as cervical cancer screening has already been proven to decrease the risk of death. This article brings attention to one case like this but unfortunately, these types of unethical studies take place all the time. It is important that we continue to share these articles so and help them gain as much publicity as possible, in order to decrease the number of unethical studies.

  3. This study actually reminded me of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Similarly, the participants of the study were not given adequate information to make an informed consent. The problem that I had with this study was that the women in the control group were offered no screening, meaning they deliberately kept these women from a test that could have possibly saved their life (this is also what happened to the men of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study). The women were not given to option to choose whether they wanted to screening or not. I think the design of the study could have been done differently so that the researchers did not deliberately harm the women, such as doing an observational study of women who did or did not get screening, not making it an experiment.

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  5. “the benefits, risks, burdens and effectiveness of a new intervention must be tested against those of the best current proven intervention.”

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