Racism/Unethical Highlights
Dr. Heller once stated, “I don't see why they should be shocked or horrified. There was no racial side to this. It just happened to be in a black community. I feel this was a perfectly straightforward study, perfectly ethical, with controls. Part of our mission as physicians is to find out what happens to individuals with disease and without disease." When PHS researchers published reports on the experiment or gave lectures at meetings, physicians questioned if the experiment was ethical. However, the doctors somehow managed to convince the physicians that they were doing very important health work and they had no need to worry about ethics. Even when the Nazi’s performed experiments on the prisoners, it became denounced. However, the Tuskegee Experiment was never questioned or denounced.
Scientists believe that the USPHS was wrong with their persistence of beliefs in the medical field (African Americans, sex, and diseases). They left the whole community in danger by leaving a communicable disease untreated. They focused mainly on racism rather than syphilis. The experiment was meant to be about scientific inquiry of how a disease progresses inside the body however it became the complete opposite. The USPHS once stated, “Racial issue was mentioned briefly. Will not affect the study. Any questions can be handled by saying these people were at the point that therapy would no longer help them. They are getting better medical care than they would under any other circumstances."
When Peter Buxton heard about the study, he requested reports from PHS and launched a government campaign to try to end the study. Withholding treatment from African Americans without their consent fueled outrages on attorneys and in the end, no one was prosecuted for committing unethical actions during the forty year experiment period. Dr. Clark once stated, “These Negroes are very ignorant and easily influenced by things that would be of minor significance in a more intelligent group."
Discussions of relationships of African Americans and medical studies go way beyond the Tuskegee Syphilis Study; racial inequality still existed after the experiment. In 1989, the Journal of the Medical Association published a report about whites and Africans receiving the treatment of heart disease. If both white and African people walked into a doctor’s office with similar chest pains and heart problems, the white patients were more likely to go through coronary angiography and twice as likely to undergo bypass surgery. A few years later, another journal reported that older African American patients who were on Medicare received bypass grafts only about a fourth as often as the whites (Gamble).
Scientists believe that the USPHS was wrong with their persistence of beliefs in the medical field (African Americans, sex, and diseases). They left the whole community in danger by leaving a communicable disease untreated. They focused mainly on racism rather than syphilis. The experiment was meant to be about scientific inquiry of how a disease progresses inside the body however it became the complete opposite. The USPHS once stated, “Racial issue was mentioned briefly. Will not affect the study. Any questions can be handled by saying these people were at the point that therapy would no longer help them. They are getting better medical care than they would under any other circumstances."
When Peter Buxton heard about the study, he requested reports from PHS and launched a government campaign to try to end the study. Withholding treatment from African Americans without their consent fueled outrages on attorneys and in the end, no one was prosecuted for committing unethical actions during the forty year experiment period. Dr. Clark once stated, “These Negroes are very ignorant and easily influenced by things that would be of minor significance in a more intelligent group."
Discussions of relationships of African Americans and medical studies go way beyond the Tuskegee Syphilis Study; racial inequality still existed after the experiment. In 1989, the Journal of the Medical Association published a report about whites and Africans receiving the treatment of heart disease. If both white and African people walked into a doctor’s office with similar chest pains and heart problems, the white patients were more likely to go through coronary angiography and twice as likely to undergo bypass surgery. A few years later, another journal reported that older African American patients who were on Medicare received bypass grafts only about a fourth as often as the whites (Gamble).