Nonmaleficence In Health Care Essay

In healthcare, the decisions around patients should be utmost to the benefit of the patient. Beneficence is the ethical principle that underlines that. As Edge & Groves stated, it is the practitioners’ obligation to promote decisions to better the health of a patient while not inhibiting a patient’s right to autonomy (2006). Any decisions made available to patients should be for the good. John Cutler, the study doctor of the Tuskegee group, stated in Deadly Deception that the withholding of treatment of antibiotics was beneficial because it would interfere the end result of the study. However, it was not a measurement that benefitted the sick (Edge & Groves, 2006). The study is exactly the opposite of this principle because it did not promote the health and welfare of the men. Nonmaleficence is an ethical principle “to not inflict evil or harm” (Edge & Groves, 2006). The actions of any professionals should not be intended to hurt any person. There were overwhelming evidence that the …show more content…
Both health professional and patient must tell the truth in order to give adequate care and treatment (Edge & Groves, 2006). The patient must tell all necessary information regarding one’s self in order to receive the appropriate care. All healthcare provider must give information relevant to a patient’s care. The doctors managing the Tuskegee research did the opposite of this principle. The doctors withheld an enormous amount of information from the men undergoing the study. First, the men were not informed that they will not receive treatment specifically for syphilis but rather just stated it was for “bad blood”; importantly did not inform that they were just a study group for natural affects of syphilis and no interventions will be done. Second, the doctors withheld information of the type of drugs the men were receiving. Last but not least, the doctors withheld information of penicillin from the