Medical research subjects scammed into participating. Who needed that bit of brain, anyway?

It used to be a big crime. But COVID normalized this activity

Ezekiel Emanuel used to say that it was our responsibility as citizens to “participate” in medical research. “Subjects” have morphed into “participants.”

Researcher have learned to reframe the terminology and thinking about human subjects as if they were co-researchers participating in a joint venture.

Dr. Emanuel (Rahm’s brother) and Christine Grady (Mrs. Tony Fauci) now set the standards for ethical research, if you can believe it.

During the early COVID period (2020) doctors were induced to (or preferred to) think that their patients had an obligation to be research subjects, because COVID. I blogged about this 4 years ago.

Well, naturally the ethical pivot hung on. And now NYC’s Mount Sinai hospital network (where my ex-husband once worked) is in big trouble for collecting bits of peoples’ brains without properly informing or asking. STAT would not be publishing this if it were not fully documented.

The fact that Mount Sinai is engaging in the same disinformation tactics as government and pharma is no surprise. Allowable ethics is a race to the bottom.

Mount Sinai, a leading hospital network in New York City, has mounted an extraordinary behind-the-scenes campaign to blunt the fallout over revelations about its controversial research project in which brain biopsies are taken from patients undergoing deep brain stimulation, STAT has learned. That has included not only enlisting its own patients to defend the research but also seeking to stop a professional society of neurosurgeons from issuing a statement that could have jeopardized the research.

The campaign began after a STAT investigation disclosed that a Food and Drug Administration review concluded that Mount Sinai researchers were misleading patients and using a false justification to obtain the biopsies.

Mount Sinai researchers had claimed, in a patient consent form and in documents submitted to the FDA and the national institutes of health, that patients in the study do not lose any additional tissue then they would during standard deep brain stimulation, a procedure used to ease the symptoms of certain neurological conditions, but a number of neurosurgeons consulted by both the FDA and STAT disputed the claim….

The enterprise of medicine needs a deep investigation and complete overhaul. Especially the human subjects research part.