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Bowery Study on Homeless People

By October 17, 2013December 9th, 2014Legacy Sport & Wellness Blog

Below are excerpts from a story published in the New York Times Health Section discussing the Bowery Study on homeless people run by the government.

“Worried about the ethics of the Bowery study, the former resident declined to be named in the paper, but told Dr. Aronowitz in a recorded interview that the biggest fear among the doctors doing the biopsies was that they would cause rectal perforations, and he regretted not telling the men in writing about that risk.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/health/medical-experiments-conducted-on-bowery-alcoholics-in-1950s.html?_r=0

“The men had their prostates removed and faced likely impotence and incontinence. And those who were also surgically castrated and given a powerful estrogen had well-known side effects from these treatments. Having their testicles removed caused a loss of sexual desire, muscle tone and stamina, and estrogen caused a heightened risk for heart attacks and strokes.”

“Dr. Parry said that a later study found estrogen therapy offered no advantages over a placebo in prolonging life in patients with prostate cancer.”

“The fact that these people, a convenient population, were used in the name of science is abhorrent,” said Jason Schwartz, a historian of medicine at Princeton who served on the staff of a presidential commission that investigated human experiments in which prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala were intentionally infected with syphilis in the 1940s to test penicillin.”

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