Advancing Honest and Ethical Medical Research
www.ahrp.org
FYI
Like many other examples of unethical research, the SUPPORT trial, conducted on extremely vulnerable premature babies, reveals how congruent interest groups—notably, government institutions and the academic medical research establishment—utilize a “strategy of ignorance” about the serious, foreseeable risks of harm, in their defense of such ethical transgression.
In the case of SUPPORT, the risks of brain damage and death were concealed from the parents whose babies were subjected to those risks--at least 23 "extra" babies' lives were sacrificed.
In Part 1 of our essay (whose title has been shortened), "Medical Research Stakeholders Seek to Overturn Informed Consent Protection--Babies in CrossHairs," the focus was on the Neonatal Research Network SUPPORT researchers who seek to return to "the good old days" when
"many pediatricians believed that it was not necessary to obtain permission of parents before using a pediatric patient as a subject in research."
In Part 2, the focus is on the unholy alliance between government officials and the Medical Research Enterprise threatens our right to Informed Consent and its corollary, our right to refuse to become a subject of medical experiments.
The institutions leading the aggressive defense for SUPPORT, while precipitating the accelerated erosion of bedrock medical ethics:
--The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its National Institute for Child and Human Development (NICHD),
--and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), which prides itself as the medical journal with the highest Impact Factor.
We compare and contrast the published evidence, against the specious arguments in defense of SUPPORT, by Dr. Francis Collins, NIH Director, Dr. Alan Guttmacher, NICHD Director, and Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, Editor of the NEJM, who vigorously defends SUPPORT, calling it, "a model of how to make medical progress."
Read Part II: http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/927/9/
Read Part I: Part I http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/925/9/
Vera Sharav
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