The Tuskegee Study Essay

In modern day society, new technology and medical procedures are expanding the medical field at a breakthrough pace. The advancements that are made every day to prolong the life of an individual raise many ethical questions on the morality of certain treatments. Bioethicists look to the four regnant pillars of bioethics when evaluating the morality of a medical procedure. For an act to be considered "ethical", it must respect the four principles: autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice.
Autonomy is the respect for an individual to make his or her own moral decisions when it comes to their health. This principle assumes that individuals are self-governing, rational agents whom are capable of making an informed and voluntary decision
This idea forms the concept of "informed consent" in the physician/patient interaction. The Tuskegee Study is a clear case study example of the blatant disregard for the rights of individuals and undermined the standard of autonomy. Four hundred illiterate black men were told that they were being treated for latent syphilis and were coerced into being a member of this study (Pence 209). Over the forty years, the individuals being studied were in fact not treated and the researchers went to extraordinary lengths to prevent any individual from receiving treatment as the goal of the experiment was to observe how syphilis progressed (Pence 209). These African American’s were taken advantage in this long-term federal government sponsored study of as they were chosen because they were a population of vulnerable people. Researchers knew that
In medicine, it is viewed as rational for a physician to positively promote the well-being of his or her patients and it is expected that physicians act in the best interest of their patients. This principle is at the very heart of health care implying that a suffering patient can enter into a relationship with one whom society has licensed as competent to provide medical care, trusting that the physician’s chief objective is to help. The goal of providing benefit can be applied both to individual patients, and to the good of society as a whole. For example, the good health of a particular patient is an appropriate goal of medicine, and the prevention of disease through research and the employment of vaccines is the same goal expanded to the population at large. It is sometimes held that non-maleficence is a constant duty, that is, one ought never to harm another individual, whereas beneficence is a limited duty. However, there are some situations when conflict arises as to what treatments are best for the patient and this was highlighted by the most famous case in bioethics: the Terri Schiavo case. This case captured the audience of the entire nation because so many parties were in conflict on how to treat Terri once she spent many years in a persistent vegetative state of which doctor’s believed there was no chance of recovery (Pence ). The major dispute was between Terri’s husband and her parents