Medicine needs trust and transparency to avoid repeating mistakes hidden in history.

History demonstrates the significance of making medical information accessible to the public, emphasizing transparency and consent. Whenever you've had a medical procedure, such as surgery or any other procedure, you were probably given a consent form and asked to sign.

Also, probably, the person giving it to you displayed a sense of wanting it signed quickly so that the procedure could get underway. Being a considerate person, you probably didn't take the time to read through the entire form before you signed it; you signed on the dotted line ASAP.

I once stood in the hallway, watching as a quite elderly man, wearing a hospital smock and seated on a gurney, was, in my words, being badgered by a young woman with a clipboard who wanted him to sign for a research protocol. He demurred, saying he didn't have his glasses and couldn't read anything.

The young woman reassured him that there was nothing he needed to read to be included in the research. He was alone and had no one to advocate for him, and I can imagine how intimidated he must have felt at that moment. The young woman only wanted him to sign, and there was little regard for how he felt or that he would not be completely aware of what he agreed to sign. Does that sound a little off to you? This was a major New York City hospital.

I recalled another time when a medical resident strongly urged someone to participate in a research study while I was present. The resident said she wouldn’t have to pay for anything because they would give her diagnoses that would justify her inclusion in the protocol. She was about to leave when he told her, “You can leave now and drop dead.” Can you say insurance fraud or breach of ethics?

People in every profession engage in activities that are questionable, potentially fraudulent, or almost cross the line with ethics. Medicine and healthcare are no different and that's where being conversant with scientific and medical history is to your advantage. I am not trying to taint the field, but I believe it's imperative that you have knowledge of the most outstanding scandals in healthcare.

There are some facts about research and medication, specifically, where patients do not know because not everything is published. For that reason, I am including an important video here that will bring you up-to-date on clinical trials. Yes, the video was made a few years ago, but that does not mean this information is no longer relevant. It's still important because the research on some medications is inadequate to back them up and they are probably still being prescribed.

A brief rundown of the more egregious ethical breaches in scientific exploration is as follows:

· The Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932–1972), which misled and withheld treatment from African-American men with syphilis

· The Willowbrook Hepatitis Studies (1956–1970) on mentally disabled children

· The CIA’s Project MKUltra (1953–1973) which gave subjects drugs like LSD, often without consent

· Plutonium injections (1945–1947) where hospital patients were injected with plutonium without their knowledge

· Surgical and radiation experiments on prison inmates in the 1960s and 1970s

One of the most recent scientific ethical breaches was in the case of a young woman who had cervical cancer, and researchers took her cells without permission and utilized them to create a multimillion-dollar business. Of course, the developed was a cell line called HeLa.

Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old African-American woman, sought cervical cancer treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in 1951. Because of their exceptional capacity to proliferate and replicate indefinitely in a lab setting, some of her cancer cells were put to use in research. Later, the so-called “immortal” cells were given the name “HeLa,” derived from the first two letters of Henrietta Lacks’s last name. Her children were never told about the removal of the cells or that they were being used in a profit–making endeavor.

Attorneys representing Henrietta Lacks’ descendants announced they had struck a settlement with a biotechnology corporation, which they accused of profiting billions of dollars from a medical system that discriminated against them. The payment was made more than 70 years after surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital removed Lacks’ cervical cells without her consent.

As long as there is money to be made, there will be those whose integrity and ethics can be dismissed and patience are left to investigate drugs or procedures on their own. Recently, it was disclosed that physicians at a major university medical center had supported vaping as not dangerous. Later, it came out that they had financial ties to the company or the product. So, it still goes on, and it will. All of us need to be aware of this, as well as the potential of consent forms, to give more than we intended to the person for whom the consent is given.

As I've said, caveat emptor (let the buyer beware). We are not buyers but in a world where medicine is largely being taken over by corporations, where we are no longer referred to as patients but clients.