Saturday, March 16, 2013
Defining Consent in Medicine
In class, we discussed the morality of giving consent within the medical field. It was brought up that an altered state of mind due to medication, panic, or stress, such as the women in Business of Being Born, could sway someone to grant consent for an intervention. Taking tissue samples and performing test procedures without consent was also mentioned in class. While I agree that ethics circles around all of this, I believe that in reality, anyone that sees a doctor is a test subject, regardless of consent. Medical advancement can't be had without medical strife. People visit the doctor and such because they are sick or diseased and need someone with the knowledge to resolve their situation help them. But the doctor that provides the treatment or diagnosis is only able to do so due to his experiences with past patients. Trial and error is a huge part of the medical field. You only know if something works until you physically try it on another person. Someone has to be the guinea pig and it's impractical to gain consent from thousands of willing test subjects to try every medical innovation ever.
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I understand where you are coming from in this comment, however, you mentioned the comment pertaining to the women in The Business of Being Born and I feel that this is a very different situation. These women are not diseased or ill, they are giving birth, so the interventions that medical professionals may introduce may have worked on past patients but that does not mean that every woman's birth is going to produce the results. So this isn't exactly the trial and error situation that may be found in individuals dealing with illness and disease, such as AIDS/HIV
ReplyDeleteThe matter of choice is obviously being discussed here, but I do believe that whether the matter involves a sick individual who needs treatment or is a mother choosing between home birth and hospital birth, that using these subjects as a test is relevant in either case. For example, using a mother who's offspring shows medical complications, as a test subject, can help for similar or identical cases in the future. Ethics is absolutely a concern in the matter and I think it depends on how far the mother and/or doctor is willing to go and how much they are willing to risk.
ReplyDeleteThis comment I remember was made in class, it was kind of one of those "never-thought-of-it-that-way" moments. But I mentioned it in an earlier comment that a lot of our "common" medical procedures were probably once an experiment, or a new thing. Of course some things like cancer treatment or medications were a bit more experimental than others. But medicine is always evolving. Things used a century ago are definitely outdated and withing coming decades a lot of these procedures used now will be outdated, which is a weird thought in some aspects.
ReplyDeleteI can agree with your thoughts concerning the consent a patient hands over when they go to the doctor. And while the situation here is not one of intentional harm, yes, some people must be the guinea pigs of the group. However, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was far more than just a trial and error situation. A multitude of people were intentionally infected with a disease, and I believe that is one of the main differences in debating the moral ethics of the experiment. Otherwise, I whole heartedly agree with the rest of your post.
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