Medical traditions are notoriously difficult to uproot, and academic medicine does not easily tolerate ethical dissent. I doubt the medical profession can be trusted to reform itself.
Several years ago, I started teaching a class on medical research scandals. It is easily the most demoralizing class I've ever taught: All scandals, all the time, for an entire semester. My reasons for teaching the class were personal. I had just emerged from a long, bitter fight with the University of Minnesota, where I teach, over the suicide of a young, mentally ill man who had been coerced into a research study in our department of psychiatry. That fight had not gone well, for reasons I was struggling to understand. I wondered: How do these things typically play out at other institutions where research scandals have occurred? The answer to that question was the most demoralizing part. Almost never do medical institutions admit fault in research studies unless they are forced to, even when the wrongdoing is clear. It is rare for research subjects who have been mistreated or their families to get any financial compensation or apology. In many cases, doctors and nurses know for years that subjects are being harmed and exploited, yet they say nothing. The whistle-blowers who dare to speak out are often ostracized, smeared, dismissed or reported to the police. It was this class, as well as my own experience, that led me to interview some of these medical whistle-blowers for my book, "The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No." The book begins with some memories of my own complicity in the mistreatment of patients during my time in medical school in the 1980s, such as pelvic exams on anesthetized, unconscious women who had not given their consent. This is the experience I reflected on this week in my guest essay for Times Opinion. Why is it so difficult to break ranks and speak out against practices that are cruel, exploitative or unfair?
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Saturday, May 11, 2024
Opinion Today: How the morally unthinkable comes to seem normal
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