In article ,
(B2431) wrote:



The U.S. DID do medical experiments on par with the Nazis. Think of the
black
men in the syphilis experiments who were deliberately left untreated as
an
example.

You are correct that the US, before WWII, did some long-term medical
studies that definitely violated the Helsinki Declaration of Human
Rights (circa 1952, from memory), written in large part due to Nazi
actions called medical experiments [1]. By modern standards, I consider
the long-term syphilis observation study an utter violation of medical
ethics.

But medical ethics evolve. It's relatively recent that controlled
double-blind studies finally gave up, for ethical reasons, a placebo
control arm guaranteed to be of no benefit to the patient. The current
ethical standard in clinical trials is that the control arm (or arms) is
the best accepted current treatment. Depending on the study design and
the ethical review and approval of at least an Institutional Review
Board and possibly other authorities, the experimental arm(s) of a
treatment [2] protocol uses an experimental therapy that has a
reasonable chance of at least equivalent results, or possibly a
combination of standard and experimental therapy.

[1] Most of what were termed Nazi medical experiments focused on
pseudo-science, racial theory justification, or evaluations of
treatments not reasonably expected to be equivalent to accepted therapy,
At the conclusion of many of these experiments, the subjects were
killed, either for autopsy or simply because they were inconvenient.

A small fraction of Nazi (and Japanese) experiments, while still
absolutely unethical, were of sufficiently careful design that their
results may have at least statistical validity. Last year, IIRC, the
issue reopened again in the New England Journal of Medicine, probably
the most prestigious medical publication. A researcher, with full
condemnation of the Nazi work, asserted that using the results of
certain experiments (e.g., anoxia and hypothermia) for legitimate
treatment-oriented research was at least some ethical recompense that
the victims hadn't died completely in vain.

Other researchers and ethicists maintain that the data from these indeed
murderous experiments should never be used in any further research. A
related question came during the Korean War, where the ONLY data
available on certain hemorrhagic fevers came from involuntary Japanese
BW studies.

In standard pharmacology textbooks, one will find papers on the effect
of cyanides on the heart, with data that came from legal execution.
There's no indication of the condemned agreed to be studied. Indeed,
there is a continuing controversy if physicians may be involved at all
in legal execution -- several state medical associations have forbidden
their members to participate in any aspect, some allow very restricted
participation.

The situation remains other than black and white. Without getting into
details well outside the scope of this discussion, there are very
ethical physicians who maintain the exact informed consent approach used
in the US is culturally inappropriate for their societies -- which have
different decision-making structures (e.g., let the family, not the
patient worry) that are benign in intent. No simple answers.

[2] Not all approved research studies necessarily benefit the patient.
Phase I drug trials most often involve administering single, or small
doses of drug to healthy volunteers in order to evaluate its
distribution in the body, side effects, etc. There are also Phase I
trials for patients with diseases with no known treatment, where the
experimental agent MIGHT do some good. A third category is pure
research, not necessarily clinically oriented at all, or used to get
statistical information on diagnostic information in large populations.

I participate in several such long-term statistical studies at NIH
Clinical Center, where I also volunteer for various experimental cardiac
imaging studies. These studies do not necessarily benefit me, although I
definitely receive an overall benefit from continuing clinical review
and recommendation by top-flight cardiologists. To help keep me stable
as a reference, I also get free regular cardiac medication from them.

In several states "mentally deficient" people were forcibly
sterilized. Maybe the U.S. didn't do these sorts of things to as many
people,
but we did do it.

Antisemitism WAS rampant in many parts of the U.S. and was one of the
reasons
FDR never included saving Jews in Nazi occupied territories. He was
afraid he
would lose support for the war.

Indeed that may have been a decision factor. There were also practical
limitations. While resistance groups and governments in exiles requested
the Allies bomb the death camps in Poland, the flight paths would have
been such that available bombers did not have the range to attack them
without a refueling stop in the USSR. The Soviets refused permission.


Having said all this the comparison between Nazi concentration camps and
the
Japanese, Italian and German internment camps in the U.S. is uncalled
for. For
one thing German internees were allowed to hang up pictures of Hitler.
The
inmates of the Nazi camps weren't allowed to post pictures of Churchill,
Stalin
or FDR.

More to the point, no US camp routinely executed groups, or subjected
them to conditions that would reasonably be expected to produce a high
death rate.