What do Tuskegee and Wikipedia have in common? On the surface, not much…
Of course there is a Wikipedia page about Tuskegee. (But for reasons that will become clear that is NOT where I began my research.)
More importantly…they BOTH are examples of where medicine has gone far wrong.
Tuskegee is obvious. Wikipedia is not.
On this podcast I discuss both of these from my recent Medical Monopoly writings. There are also additional thoughts on the craziness going on and how it’s all happening afterwards.
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Medical Monopoly Musings #46
Scientific Racism
With race being in the news, I figured it would be worth looking into conventional medicine’s racist past up to current times. Yep, scientific racism is deeply wrapped in eugenic roots and a part of how modern medicine came to be.
Understand that both science and medicine were some of the strongest tools used to reinforce the belief that white men were superior.
There’s no better well-known example of this than that of Tuskegee. Syphilis was a scourge at the time. Medical treatment for this involved mercury and arsenic which, as you might imagine, had a low cure rate and toxic side effects including death.
The official name of this scientific study was “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” which began in 1932. 600 black men were enrolled in Macon country, Alabama. 399 with syphilis and 201 without. The researchers told the men they were being treated for “bad blood” but no treatment was given beyond placebo, instead just observation of the disease running its course which included blindness, insanity and death.
The study was done without informed consent, meaning the participants were lied to about what was happening. They called it a “study in nature” rather than an experiment because it was believed that black people would not seek out treatment for syphilis.
It was originally designed to last just 6 months. But they decided to continue it for what amounted to 40 years.
In 1945, penicillin became the accepted treatment for syphilis. Not only were the patients in the study not treated, but efforts were made to stop them from getting treatment elsewhere such as from local doctors. The Alabama Health Department was given a list of people in the study to not treat.
Even when the army drafted these men and uncovered syphilis during exams, they were removed from the army, rather than be treated!
In a report on the study, Senior Public Health Service administrator Oliver Wenger wrote, "We know now, where we could only surmise before, that we have contributed to their ailments and shortened their lives. I think the least we can say is that we have a high moral obligation to those that have died to make this the best study possible." Not let’s stop this study, just let’s make good science. To use the words “high moral” in there is cruelly ironic.
If wasn’t just the infected men that suffered. Due to lack of treatment, syphilis spread including to the men’s wives and children (congenital syphilis).
In the 60’s concerns were raised. But in 1969 the Centers for Disease Control and American Medical Association, two of our great noble institutions, both officially supported continuation of the study.
A whistleblower, Peter Buxtun, leaked information to the New York Times, which published a front page article in 1972 condemning the study. An advisory panel was formed to investigate. Their conclusion was the study was “ethically unjustified” and ordered it to stop. Two years later a $10 million out-of-court settlement was reached.
As President in 1997, Bill Clinton offered an official apology. “Medical people are supposed to help when we need care, but even once a cure was discovered, they were denied help, and they were lied to by their government. Our government is supposed to protect the rights of its citizens; their rights were trampled upon…The United States government did something that was wrong, deeply, profoundly, morally wrong... To our African American citizens, I am sorry that your federal government orchestrated a study so clearly racist.”
A one-time mistake, right? Well there’s the U.S. sponsored study from 1946 to 1948, involving at least one of the same scientists from Tuskegee, where Guatemalans were INTENTIONALLY INFECTED with syphilis and other STD’s without consent.
Science being objective and amoral…can easily be used to inject whatever morality those practicing it have, including the inferiority of certain peoples.
No, it wasn’t just Nazi scientists that conducted cruel medical experiments. It’s been far more common than you might think.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history/40-years-human-experimentation-america-tuskegee-study
https://www.research.usf.edu/dric/hrpp/foundations-course/docs/finalreport-tuskegeestudyadvisorypanel.pdf
https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/clintonp.htm
https://www.history.com/news/the-infamous-40-year-tuskegee-study
*****
Medical Monopoly Musings #47
Wikipedia’s Medical Lockdown
Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit…except that’s not quite the truth. Editors that have been around since the beginning have control over edits almost completely.
Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson discusses this in a 2016 news report. “The promise of accurate, neutral articles and privacy for contributors is often just a mirage, according to two insiders.” Of note here is the problem of special interests controlling information.
You don’t have to look much further than co-founder Larry Sanger, who said “People that I would say are trolls sort of took over. The inmates started running the asylum.” In May of this year he wrote an article titled “Wikipedia is Badly Biased” stating that Wikipedia’s neutral point of view “is dead.”
Few places is this more true than Wikipedia’s medical articles. Yet, these get even more traffic than WebMD. “Nearly 75% of US physicians going online for professional purposes are visiting Wikipedia for medical information according to Manhattan Research,” says Eileen O’Brien, Director, Search & Innovation at Siren Interactive. “And 36% of US consumers searched for health info on Wikipedia according to Rodale’s DTC Study.”
Why so popular? A big reason is Google holds Wikipedia in high esteem, a top ten result for almost any search will yield a Wikipedia article. Often times, they embed excerpts into the search page itself. Just recently, Facebook has been testing adding Wikipedia to its search results.
Despite its popularity a study found that 9 out of 10 medical entries contained inaccuracies and antiquated data. Only one out of ten was correct and up-to-date with medical research!
How does Wikipedia look at health? They are strongly in the conventional medicine is the only medicine camp.
Look at how they display it. Alternative and pseudo are falsely equated. Right next to alternative medicine we have quackery, pseudoscience and antiscience. In fact, they define alternative medicine as describing “any practice that aims to achieve the healing effects of medicine, but which lacks biological plausibility and is untested, untestable or proven ineffective.” Does that sound fair and neutral?
Something as simple as breathwork is somehow fringe medicine and science (and right next to camel urine).
“Non-pharmaceutical treatments for diseases from arthritis to asthma, treatments and practitioners alike condemned out of hand as “lunatic charlatans” by Wikipedia’s co-founder and spiritual father Jimmy Wales along with his Skeptic palace guard,” says Progressive Radio Network.
So let’s see how that is done…
Greg Kohls, a man blocked from editing on Wikipedia, says, “Wikipedia is often edited by people who have an agenda…You'll have different people with a particular scientific point of view and they'll edit and modify Wikipedia so that its articles kind of reflect that point of view.”
To show an example, after making an edit to Morgellons disease, it was removed 38 minutes later by an administrator. Kohs says, “It seems to me that this is someone who is either involved with the medical profession or the pharmaceutical profession. They probably have an agenda to discredit or to suppress alternative medicines, things of that nature.”
Scandals have erupted before over editors being paid by businesses for positive edits. Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca’s employees got caught for positively editing its drug entries, including removing the side effect for those under 18 of increased suicidality for the drug Seroquel.
Medtronic had an employee editing pages for surgeries, such as kyphoplasties, that used their medical devices to show the surgery in a more positive light.
These incidents may be fairly easy to catch. But is there a roundabout way of doing it? From past issues (#28 and 29) we know that the NIH is riddled with conflicts of interest from Big Pharma thanks to Harold Varmus ever since the 90’s. And the NIH encourages Wikipedia editing, having guidelines that “will help you to become part of a unique opportunity in keeping with the NIH’s history of making credible, vetted, authoritative information available to the public. The time spent can be minimal, but the impact could be great.”
That’s all well and good if accurate. That’s quite horrible if used for narrative control. The conflict of interests won’t be disclosed because these are “publicly paid” scientists. Just a few key people doing this well will have large impacts on the public.
References:
http://fullmeasure.news/news/cover-story/the-dark-side-of-wikipedia
https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/
https://www.jmir.org/2015/3/e62/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_medicine
https://www.ibtimes.com/wikipedia-dangerous-your-health-study-finds-9-out-10-health-entries-contain-many-errors-1591527
https://prn.fm/wikipedia-big-pharmas-propaganda-machine/
https://www.cnet.com/news/corruption-in-wikiland-paid-pr-scandal-erupts-at-wikipedia/
http://www.healthcarevox.com/2007/08/astrazeneca_employee_edits_wik.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/wikipedia-editors-for-pay/393926/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8415091/Facebook-tests-features-add-Wikipedia-results-search-queries.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20150219012129/http://www.nih.gov/icd/od/ocpl/resources/wikipedia/
https://www.jmir.org/2011/1/e14/
