Management in the News

Management in the News

When a person thinks of a doctor the first thing to come to mind is probably someone that you can trust to treat an illness. Unfortunately this is not always the case, some doctors do things that are unethical and do not have their patients best interest in mind. There have been reports of testing being done on patients without their consent or knowledge of it happening and there are also stories out there that state some doctors are abusing their power to experiment with their patients using untested drugs. According to Medicine in the 20th century (2010) “In 1932 the US Public Health Service began an experiment in which black patients who thought they were being treated for syphilis in fact had no treatment. The supposed scientific benefit was to understand the effects of the disease in its last stages. One hundred of the ‘patients’ were dead before the study was finally halted in 1972. Another example concerns the testing of polio vaccines and many other medicines on US prison inmates who were not fully informed of the dangers to which they were being subjected.” These are a few examples of healthcare workers abusing their power.

According to Gutierrez (2009), “Three doctors and six nurses from the town of Grudziadz, Poland, are being investigated on charges that they recruited 350 homeless people into a clinical trial of a vaccine for the H5N1 flu virus without informing them what the study was really about.” Of the 350 people injected with this vaccine “Twenty-one people died during the course of the study, significantly higher than the average influenza death rate, which would have led to eight deaths.” (Gutierrez, 2009) According to this article the people recruited were homeless and were offered a very small amount of money to test a vaccine for the seasonal flu, they were not informed of the actual truth and they were used as guinea pigs with disregard to their rights to informed as human beings.

The doctors and...