A Review of Past and Modern Unethical Medical Practice
Abstract
Medicine is known for the strong tradition of reviewing outcomes so current and future clinicians can learn from prior mistakes, and continually improve standards of care. The processes of peer chart review, publication of case studies, and detailed presentations during morbidity and mortality conferences allow for ongoing education and improvements in clinical outcomes. Clinicians are strongly encouraged to learn from medical errors and “near-misses,” which is a term used to describe potential medical errors that were caught before reaching the patient. The same fundamental principles of learning from previous mistakes or actions of health care providers (HCP) can be applied to examples of unethical medical research and immoral clinical practice. Being informed of previous unethical behavior can help deter current and future practitioners as well as public health researchers from acting in a similar fashion, and may also help explain some of the distrust of the medical community by some subsets of the population.