"Natural Laboratories"

The article “ ‘Natural laboratories:’ Medical Experimentation in Native Communities” seemed to have two main purposes. The first was to serve as an exposé of the horrific trials of vaccines and other experimental medications on Native Americans; the second purpose was to discount the usefulness of vaccines, and to a lesser extend, western medicine in general. I thought that the author accomplished the first purpose very well. The attacks on vaccines and western medicine, however, were not supported well at all, and many of the facts presented were twisted or cited out of context to support this idea.

One example would be the discussion of the polio vaccine, which was used to demonstrate one drawback in general of vaccines (not of their testing, but just of their use in general in medicine) as being that sometimes they caused people to contract the disease that they were being vaccinated against. It was cited that between 1973 and 1983, 87% of all cases of polio were caused by the vaccine. But totally missing is the fact that polio cases were really, really rare at this time because the vaccine protected the vast majority of the population from the disease. In the 1950’s, right after the vaccine’s invention, that percentage was probably much less than 1% since polio was so common then. The beneficial effect of the vaccine was completely ignored.

It’s not fair to deny the right of Alaskan natives to practice or prefer their own traditional medical practices; but it is inaccurate to reduce western medicine to something that only “senselessly dissects, vivisects and experiments on both animals and human beings, when there are much more effective preventative and holistic forms of medicine,” as was stated in the concluding paragraph of the paper. Lost in this statement is that

a) western medicine has come to prescribe many of the same preventative measures and treatment recommended by traditional medicine; for example, many drugs used in modern medicine have been derived from plants used by traditional healers (aspirin perhaps being a classic example)

b) Some experimentation had to have gone on in the past to determine what plants were useful to use in sickness and which ones were toxic; the history of that experimentation that led to the development of traditional medical practices just hasn’t been passed on to us today. Ideally, in both modern medicine and traditional medicine, experimental remedies would be tried with the full awareness of the dangers and consent on the patient’s part, and the underprivileged would not be singled out to serve as human lab rats.

c) Plus there are some problems that modern Western medicine has more effectively dealt with than traditional medicine. Cancer is no longer the death sentence that it used to be; vaccines were used to eliminate smallpox.

Using people as guinea pigs without their consent is unpardonable; so is targeting specific people or groups of people perceived as "others" as guinea pigs. But I don’t believe that this issue is an inseparable part of western medicine, nor necessarily that western medicine has been less effective (or even completely distinct from) traditional medicinal techniques, as the conclusion of the paper states.

(a really long blog, that wasn't supposed to happen...sorry for being long-winded)