Hey YouTube, Jim here! Welcome to Top 10 Archive! Certainly, you’ve wondered whether your family
doctor is as nice as he looks. Well, they probably are, but there are some bad ones out there and
times before were a lot more lenient towards experimentation and malpractice. And today,
we'll be looking at 10 of those such cases. Here is the Top 10 Worst Things Doctors Have Ever Done!
10. Agent Orange Experiments From 1965 to 1966, Dr. Albert Kligman
was sponsored by Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson, and the U.S. Army to experiment on people’s skin.
Those people were none other than involuntary participants sourced directly from prison, about
75 people in total. The “dermatological research” was actually how Agent Orange affected humans.
Prisoners were injected with a toxic byproduct of Agent Orange, but Dr. Kligman wasn’t exactly
following normal procedure here. He injected them with 468 times the amount called for in the
experiment. The results were horrific. Prisoners had violent eruptions of severe acne on the face,
armpits, and groin. Prisoners continued to suffer from the effects of the exposure long after the
experiment. Dr. Kligman seemed enthusiastic about his study, and was quoted saying, “All
I saw before me were acres of skin… It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.”
Perhaps not all bad, Kligman went on to become the doctor behind Retin-A, a major treatment for acne.
9. Medication Mistakes That Turn Fatal Something that might have you doubting your
prescription even now is the fact that millions of people are often prescribed the wrong medicine,
or even the right medicine at the wrong dose. It’s not often,
but about 4 out of every 250 prescriptions filled have errors. It can be, on the one hand,
an error on the doctor’s side, or on the other, a pharmacist’s mistake. Sadly, a lot of these
avoidable mistakes often lead to death. In one case, babies born at 27 weeks were prescribed
a lethal dose of morphine. In another, a man was given a drug put in lethal injections
instead of an antacid, causing him to become unresponsive. It goes without saying,
before taking your medication, be sure to do your own research as well.
8. Wrong Surgeries Even scarier is when
you get the right prescription, but it’s after someone performed the wrong surgery.
After you’re wheeled off and put under, there’s a chance you’ll get a different surgery than the
one you were scheduled for. Over a 20-year period, a study showed 2,447 lawsuits filed for patients
who received a different procedure than they actually needed. One woman needed her appendix
removed and instead had a fallopian tube taken out. Another had a heart operation he didn’t need.
There's always surgery mix-ups as well, where another patient and yourself undergo each others
surgeries. Going in for surgery can be one of the most dangerous things that you have
to take a chance on. After all, you do need the surgery. You just hope they do the right one.
7. The Monster Study Doctors sometimes do tend to prey on the
most vulnerable. Take kids for instance. In 1939, Wendell Johnson and his grad student Mary Tudor,
at the University of Iowa, took on an experiment involving 22 non-stuttering orphan children.
The experiment was about stuttering and involved splitting kids into two groups.
One received positive speech therapy with praise and encouragement, and the other, negative therapy
with criticism and insults. Children in the negative therapy group didn’t come out with
a stutter, but did suffer speech problems and psychological effects for the rest of their lives.
The study was somehow allowed, and is now appropriately dubbed “The Monster Study.”'
On August 17th, 2007, seven of the orphan children were awarded a total of $1.2M by
the State of Iowa for their lifelong emotional and psychological scars attributed to the experiment.
6. Whirling Chairs In the mid 19th century, a movement began that
thought beyond how the mentally ill were currently treated. Instead of harsh lock-and-chain methods,
they thought of “more humane” treatments. One of these was the “whirling chair,” a modified
chair with a spring, a level, and the capacity to spin patients until they passed out. They thought
the spinning would cure schizophrenia and other illnesses by shuffling the contents of the brain,
allowing them to reorganize. They usually wouldn't stop until the patient would either
pass out or vomited everywhere, whichever came first. Although inhumane by today's standards,
we still pay carnivals to do this exact thing to our children, so I guess this one isn't so bad.
5. Project 4.1
Project 4.1 was a medical study on the natives of the Marshall Islands. In 1952,
they were exposed to radiation fallout from the Castle Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll,
which accidentally blew upwind to the nearby islands. Instead of informing and treating the
residents of the island, the U.S elected to just sit back to watch and study what would happen.
Their findings at first were inconclusive. Miscarriages and stillbirths increased
for the first 10 years, but then returned to normal. Some children had developmental issues,
but no conclusive pattern was detected. After that, though, this pattern did emerge,
and it was an ugly one. Children began developing thyroid cancer at significantly higher rates
than would be considered normal. By 1974, almost a third of exposed islanders developed tumors.
4. Who’s Your Daddy? This, frankly sick doctor, named Cecil B Jacobson,
was a fertility physician who botched a lot of procedures. While he was meant to help women be
artificially inseminated with their partner’s sperm, or that of an anonymous donor, Jacobson
used his own instead. In this horrible way, he became the biological father of 15 children
that we can prove with DNA tests, though many think the number is closer to 75. In 1992,
he was convicted on 52 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, and perjury, had his medical license
revoked and was sentenced to 5 years in prison. As of the posting of this video, he is still
alive and seemingly well at the age of 84, living in Utah and involved in agricultural research.
3. The Aversion Project Probably one of the most
embarrassing studies in history, the Aversion Project was a South African attempt at “healing”
and “getting rid of” gay people by sending them to a military hospital between 1971
and 1989. There, they were submitted to chemical castrations, electric shock treatments,
and more things we probably shouldn't mention. The “patients” were between 16 and 24 years old
and had been drafted into the military. Some were subjected to “sexual reassignment” surgeries,
often incomplete. Then they had to seek their own hormone therapies to maintain their new,
unsolicited sexual identities. The experiment was led by Dr. Aubrey Levin, who moved on from it to
become the clinical professor at the University of Calgary. In 2010, his license was suspended,
not because of the horrors of his past, but, ironically, because of advances he made toward a
male student. He was then sentenced to five years in prison for consequent sexual assaults on men.
2. Sterilization Experiments Sterilization procedures can
hardly be called experiments since we all know exactly what the result of a sterilization is.
However, Nazi doctors decided to exterminate all “non-Aryans” by sterilizing all inmates at
concentration camps” to find out not whether they could do it, but how they could make it
the cheapest and more effective. One attempt was a chemical irritant, which would block the
fallopian tubes. Another, X-rays which caused severe burns, not just on reproductive organs
but also on the skin. In both experiments, many died and everyone suffered, just horrible.
1. The Tuskegee Experiments Finally, the rather well-known Tuskegee
experiments were done on African American men of Tuskegee Tennessee without their knowledge. This
experiment is often cited as the reason why many African-Americans distrust medicine in general.
During the experiment, doctors identified men with syphilis, and looked to find out whether no
treatment was better than the treatments they were using. They never told the men that they had the
illness and instead, for 40 years, the men didn’t receive treatment, even after penicillin became
available. This may seem like it was in the 1800s, but it was in the 1970's! By the end of the study,
only 74 of the almost 400 men were still alive. In that time, many of their wives had contracted the
disease and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis. All while doctors knew exactly what was
going on and didn’t tell them. Truly one of the most negligent moments in medical history.