April 04, 2006

Culture Dish on Vindication of Baby Experiment

Culture Dish is a blog I hadn't seen before, but she wrote us to say she likes our blog and there's this great post there, but I found her so fascinating that it was 20 minutes before I finished reading her CV and sample work. Wow. Anyway the post begins:
Eight years ago, two UK doctors were suspended from their posts for using an experimental treatment on babies in respiratory distress. Instead of intubating the infants (which is standard practice but can cause damage), they used something called Continuous Negative Extrathoracic Pressure (CNEP), which involved putting a box over the baby's chest to create a vacuum that helps the child expand it's lungs and draw in air. In 1998, two years after they published their research, the doctors became the focus of a governmental inquiry because parents complained that they hadn't consented to the use of experimental treatments on their children. The doctors were suspended, the investigation took years -- it uncovered problems with the trial, but the hospital challenged the parents' complaints, saying they couldn't prove they hadn't been told. Then the whole thing seemed to fade away ...

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