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Treat Patients As Humans
Proposition: Health care professionals should avoid dehumanizing patients or research participants.
Introduction: [Visual aid.] “This is Henrietta Lacks, wife mother, and tobacco farmer…” I will explain the story of Lacks’ cancer and the use of her cells, called HeLa cells, in making vaccines, such as the one that helped cure polio. Lacks’ cells helped push medicine forward and are even used today, but most people do not know who she is. Her family didn’t even know. Her cells were taken, and she was forgotten, but physicians should recognize the patient as a person, and not just a test subject.
- Physician-patient relationships assist in healing.
- Patients who have a good relationship with their primary care physician trust their doctor more, are more hopeful, and feel a sense of acknowledgement.
- Doctors sometimes maintain distance for personal reasons because the job can be emotionally taxing. However, too much distance reduces empathy, leading to a medical environment in which the patient does not feel safe or cared for.
- The effects of a poor doctor-patient relationship are easy to see.
- Dehumanization can lead to a lack of privacy, or fear of a lack of privacy.
- Doctors are privy to very private, uncomfortable information, and patients who do not trust their doctors are left with a fear of disclosing information.
- The use of invasive medical technology or remote technology allows for greater accuracy in examinations, but some technology may increase the doctor-patient distance, making patients feel like specimens in a lab, without control over their bodies or their health information.
- The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted to ensure privacy for patients’ backgrounds and medical history.
- By seeing research participants as humans, we could avoid problems such as those faced by Henrietta Lacks’ family.
- Lacks’ descendants are living in a low-income area and cannot afford health insurance, yet so many have benefited from Lacks’ cells.
- The HeLa cells were taken without the family’s knowledge or permission. The ethical dilemma here involves the question of just allocations of benefits from research. If lacks had been remembered as a person more than as a source of cells, different decisions might have been made.
- HIPAA alone may protect patients from being unwillingly or unknowingly involved in research. However, the problem requires conscientiousness on the part of doctors more than just the following of a law.
Conclusion: Dehumanization is counterintuitive to the main goal of medicine, which is to help and heal humans. Health care professionals should keep humanistic concerns in mind. Humans are living beings, not just puzzles made of cells.