 |
| Pneumoencephalography scene in The Exorcist (1973) |
Do you think “pneumoencephalography” should be illegal? Should all torturous, life-threatening medical procedures be abandoned? Do you think it requires an admirable kind of courage or mental toughness on the part of doctors who submit patients to such torture in order to advance scientific knowledge or is it mere callousness and indifference to the suffering of others?
I think it should be illegal! I think the doctors have to be part evil to put another human in such pain. Thank God that we have advanced to painless ways to do things. I can't imagine how horrific and terrifying it must have been on the patients recieving this torture.
ReplyDeleteMorgan Hicks
I think pneumoencephalography should definitely be illegal. The purpose of the medical field is to add to life in some way whether it be in years or in quality. Torture and life-threatening procedures do not add anything to life but unnecessary pain and suffering. I think that the doctors who administered these kinds of procedures had to harden their hearts to the patients. While the doctors thought they were advancing the medical field by taking clearer images of the brain, they also had to know that the individual patients would suffer much in the process. Perhaps the physicians thought that the pros outweighed the cons, but I, for one, could not live with myself if I ended someone's life early to advance the name of science.
ReplyDeleteEmily Davis
Pneumoencephalography is obviously a painful process, but i could see it justified seeing as it could lead to many crucial discoveries. It is easy to look at the doctors and claim themm as evil and hardened, and while it must have been hard for them to conduct such research, it could have been necessary. Would you as easily turn away a treatment that was only possible by such experiments? The atomic bombs had clear flaws in terms of innocent people dying and mass destruction. Could you two as easily say not to drop those bombs even if it meant the loss of a war? I believe the pros weigh out the cons if such research could save multiple lives in the future.
ReplyDeleteMichael,
DeleteI understand where you are coming from with your question. The problem arises when the procedures are being done on unwilling or uneducated patients (the patients at the Hospital for Negro Insane being both). While there is much to be learned from clear brain scans of mental health patients, it seems sad to me that the scans were obtained from patients who did not give consent (nor did the families give consent).
Emily Davis
I definitely think that pneumoencephalography should be illegal. Anything that is that painful and torturous to the unwilling patient should be illegal.
ReplyDeletestormy wigley
This procedure should most defiantly be illegal. It far over steps the line of what is humane. As for all torturous procedures being abandoned, I don't see that as out of the question either, especially in the case that the patient has not given consent. Perhaps, if people wanted to volunteer themselves as subjects for these experiments it would be one thing, but it is especially frightening to think that this procedure was performed on people with handicaps that really had no way of objecting like Elsie, Henrietta's daughter diagnosed with "idiocy". The doctors preforming these tests must have had severe callous and extreme views of what lengths are acceptable to go to for the "good of science". I feel like what went on in the Hospital for the Negro Insane is similar to the Nazi doctors experimenting on the Jews; they are somehow justifying in their minds that their sadistic experiments are acceptable because their subjects are "second rate" human beings. I like what Emily said about the purpose of the medical field being to improve the quality of or the longevity of life. Though these practices might benefit the future of the medical field, they are undermining its present purpose.
ReplyDeleteAnna Talkington
While it's admirable to want to end pain, the problem is that pain is not intrinsically bad. Pain is just a signal (of damage occurring, whether the end result is a bleeding scrape or a surgically-removed tumor). Sure, it's really, really unpleasant--but the reason some medical procedures are painful is not because they're cruel; they shouldn't be illegal just because they cause pain. "Torturous and life-threatening" describes quite a few life /saving/ medical techniques, like chemotherapy, physical therapy and radiation--you could even say rehabilitation from a drug problem. Think about it: they waste the person away to nothing, and they cause unfathomable pain. However, we know these procedures are helpful; we keep them around and certainly don't outlaw them. Personally, I hope one day I can be the kind of doctor who would do anything to save a patient, even something that would be difficult and painful for them.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, the medical field always has a flaw. And that flaw is always a problem we don't understand. For instance, "bleeding" used to be a common practice to cure sickness. All of us today know that it doesn't work, and that it is actually quite harmful, but back then doctors thought they were actually helping their patients. The medical field has always been like that. Very few times do they get it right the first time. There's always a problem, a wrong way of fixing it (or several), a realization, and then a correct solution. As medicine progresses this is less of an issue, but it still happens. I'm not really sure it's okay to force these practices onto the mentally handicapped though, especially when here it was so little understood.
ReplyDeleteIt should be illegal if the patient is forced to participate without fully knowing what is happening or without their consent at all. No one should have to go through such unbearable pain. However, as procedures like this can aid in medical advancements, if a person willingly, and knowingly, volunteers to be a subject in such a practice, I see no harm in it. That person is free to make his or her own decision.
ReplyDeleteThe doctors would have had to have courage to perform such a task, definitely, but I do not know that I would call it 'admirable'. They were torturing innocent people. While they might have seen it differently, it was still wrong.
Many of you are troubled by the treatment of the mentally handicapped as somehow less than human. Do you think the humanity of the researchers who worked on them is somehow diminished by the way they treated these people? How might their lack of empathy for these people have affected them (the researchers) in other ways?
ReplyDeleteI think the humanity of these researchers is certainly diminished in the sense that they become desensitized to the fact that they are actually working on human beings who feel pain and emotions. I have to wonder if it also stunts a person’s capacity for compassion when they practice these research techniques on the mentally handicapped. Researchers that work with the mentally handicapped should be compassionate, educated about the person’s condition, and trained to respond to the person. The handicapped are like children in the sense that they are subject to whatever someone exposes them to. They are defenseless. I can’t help but wonder if those researchers were able to justify working on the helpless because they classified them as less human, then wouldn’t they have no problem subjecting any human they view as inferior, such as a person of a certain race or creed, to horrible testing? They sound a little like the Nazi doctors to me, who I think very few people have a positive connotation of.
DeleteAnna Talkington