by The history of medicine is riddled with tales of misplaced trust in bloodthirsty surgeons and curious practitioners who violated their oaths to never do harm in the pursuit of their own dark interests. In fact, the advent of anesthesia in England heralded an age of horror and death, where mortality rates skyrocketed as doctors became enabled to explore living human bodies unhindered by the objections of a conscious patient. Some may say that we have exited such a cruel age of western medicine, and that doctors and biotech companies have earned our implicit trust, though there have still been relatively recent events which would otherwise invalidate that argument.
If one were to look back not even 100 years through American history, you could rather easily find the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service experimented on Black men while withholding crucial information of the experiment in which they were participating from them. The men involved had had no knowledge that they were in a study on untreated syphilis in adult men, but instead were told that they were being treated for “bad blood”, a vague term used at the time for a number of conditions. In this experiment, over 200 men were given syphilis, with an additional 399 syphilis positive men monitored as well, in an age where little was known about the disease, and there was no present option of treatment or a cure.
The study, initially projected to last less than a year, was extended for roughly 40 years, until 1972, when it was exposed and subjected to a class-action lawsuit. While participants were initially subject to a number of treatments, such medications and trials were cut off, and the participants were restricted from the life-saving penicillin when it became later available within the duration of the experiment. This experiment disgusted both the medical community, as well as citizens of the world with the calloused and vile treatment of unknowing and undeserving men. It violated every tenet of modern doctors and left an indelible stain on the perception of doctors and experiments that would normally be in pursuit of vanquishing diseases that plague the world.
While there have been no recent events of similar scale and magnitude, a significant number of people find trusting health care professionals and medical companies to be an impossible task, which, in view of the number of regrettable events, is an entirely understandable viewpoint. While trust should not be implicit, it can be earned, and trust is necessary for ethical and well-meaning experiments to properly and effectively address and explore issues that plague current society. Often the information that doctors and drug companies look for can be embarrassing or personal, but it is often in the best interest of the patient, and of those who suffer from similar circumstances across the world. All too often we are at the whims and mercy of those around us, and while this can be a scary prospect given the number of historical events that tarnish their reputation, we can and should trust them, provided we can trust in a balancing force that holds those who commit misdeeds accountable for their actions as a means of discouraging future injustice.