15 Aug picot
Classmates,
The history of biomedical research and medicine is necessary to study to avoid mistakes and prevent unethical mistreatment of patients and research objects. The dramatic history of research in biomedical science called for an ethical code to be developed to guide the research.
Medical ethical standards differ from everyday ethics in many ways. Everybody agrees that killing is wrong. But general public and health care professionals have different views on abortion. Some fanatic researchers might not see anything being wrong with cloning sheep or humans, but others would disagree. Living in the era of unprecedented expansion of knowledge and technology, we truly require research ethics to build upon or being rediscovered again. Stem cell research, in-vitro fertilization, and organ transplantation were just a few of the recent ethical dilemmas. Biomedical research can become a social dilemma, like in the case of the covid-19 vaccine. An FDA unapproved vaccine reached the market to save people at large. Being a pro-vaccine myself, seeing the devastating effect of under vaccination with a new, more aggressive strain killing my patients every day, I can see the contra arguments antivaccine supporters make. Those are truly questions raised by research ethics and supported by the Nuremberg Code (e.g., giving voluntary consent) and the Declaration of Helsinki (e.g., protecting the life and health of the research participants) (Czeh et al., 2018).
My research area is the effect of Targeted Temperature Management on neurologic function and mortality on unconscious patients who survived a cardiac arrest. Due to the nature of my topic, the sources of my research are retrospective cohort studies, meta-analyses analyzing cohort studies, and one randomized controlled study. All of the researchers in the studies I reviewed adequately protected the patients’ rights: consent was explained and signed by the next of kin, and Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved.
