Healthcare and Human Dignity

Law Matters

Frank M. McClellan

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781978802971
• Topic: Derecho
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica del derecho

The individual and structural biases that affect the American healthcare system have serious emotional and physical consequences that all too often go unseen. These biases are often rooted in power, class, racial, gender or sexual orientation prejudices, and as a result, the injured parties usually lack the resources needed to protect themselves. In Healthcare and Human Dignity, individual worth, equality, and autonomy emerge as the dominant values at stake in encounters with doctors, nurses, hospitals, and drug companies. Although the public is aware of legal battles over autonomy and dignity in the context of death, the everyday patient's need for dignity has received scant attention. Thus, in Healthcare, law professor Frank McClellan's collection of cases and individual experiences bring these stories to life and establish beyond doubt that human dignity is of utmost priority in the everyday process of healthcare decision making.

Part 1

Fighting for Access to Care

Introduction

Human Dignity as a Lived Experience

We take human dignity for granted until it is snatched away. “Imagine feeling like you have no power and no voice.”¹ These words were spoken by Aly Raisman, a two-time Olympic gold medal winner, in her testimony at the sentencing hearing of Lawrence G. Nassar, a doctor specializing in gynecology who had been abusing his young patients for years. He had been entrusted to provide medical care to the girls, many of whom were training for sports as college and Olympic athletes. The doctor was convicted in federal court on charges of child pornography and faced criminal charges in state court for multiple counts of sexual assault on minors. He was sentenced to sixty years in prison on the federal charge. At his state sentencing hearing, 140 women and girls filed victim impact statements, and many of the patients testified to the specific acts of abuse and how they had been emotionally traumatized. The Michigan state trial judge sentenced Nassar to 40 to 175 years in prison.²

Ms. Raisman’s description captures the feeling of agony and helplessness of a person who suffered a violation of her human dignity by a person with superior power: the women and girls testified that, under the guise of conducting pelvic exams, Nassar would tell them to lie on a table while he probed their vaginas.³ The violations of their bodies did not cause serious physical harm. However, the testimony of the victims clearly established that they had sustained severe emotional harm. Some contemplated suicide.⁴ Their human dignity had been violated, and they felt powerless to seek redress. Ms. Raisman testified further about the restorative feeling of regaining her dignity now that she could publicly confront the person who assaulted her.⁵

In addition to the criminal penalties imposed on Dr. Nassar, Michigan State University settled a civil lawsuit against the university based on allegations that the university either deliberately ignored the conduct of Dr. Nassar or failed to exercise reasonable care to protect the women and girls from the harm he inflicted on them. The university agreed to a settlement of $500 million to be paid to 331 women and girls who joined the lawsuit alleging that Dr. Nassar sexually molested them.⁶

Assaults on human dignity usually reflect an abuse or misuse of power that attacks a person’s sense of worth. The assault goes beyond a mere insult and demonstrates a total disrespect of the person. Insults from a person on an equal level can be rebuffed, but if the words or actions come from someone with power over the person being insulted, there is a good chance that the latter’s sense of worth will be undermined. It is remarkable how often victims’ stories of feeling indignant involve a use of power that is driven by animus against a person’s race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation.

Healthcare offers an environment that is ripe for violations of human dignity. There is a vast imbalance of power between the healthcare professional and a patient. The superior knowledge and skill possessed by healthcare professionals and their control over access to diagnosis and treatment compel patients to trust them. In addition, the personal nature of medical care necessitates an intimacy in the interactions that shields the perpetrator’s conduct and decision making from criticism. Most medical treatment occurs in private, where the only witnesses to the interaction are the patient and her doctor and/or nurse and other allied healthcare professionals. After the care is rendered, the healthcare provider will enter a written or electronic record of what was done, but this record is kept confidential to protect the privacy of the patient in accordance with federal and state laws, as well as the fiduciary duties of healthcare providers. The private nature of the doctor-patient interaction combines with the imbalance of power to shield misconduct by healthcare professionals for long periods of time. In 2018 the University of Southern California (USC) acknowledged a deplorable example of long-standing abuse when it paid $215 million to settle claims of female students that they were sexually abused by a gynecologist employed by the university.⁷ The gynecologist involved, Dr. George Tyndall, practiced at USC for nearly thirty years until he was suspended in 2016 after a complaint by a healthcare worker who alleged that Dr. Tyndall made sexually inappropriate comments to patients. The settlement funds were made available to thousands of women Dr. Tyndall treated during his thirty-year tenure at USC, regardless of whether the patients made allegations of abuse against Dr. Tyndall. Doctors and nurses are members of caring professions who take oaths to put the best interests of their patients before their own interests in earning money and gaining prestige. Nevertheless, the healthcare system sometimes fails to provide a shield against inhumane conduct. The history of healthcare in America offers disturbing examples of patients not being treated with the dignity they deserve as human beings.⁸ Examples include racial, gender, sexual orientation, class, and other group-based discrimination. I think all of these examples represent an invasion of human dignity, and we gain new insight as to the common motivations and resulting injuries when we view this conduct and evaluate it in the light of human dignity as a predominant value that should govern relationships among all human beings.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study ranks as one of the cruelest examples in medicine of the abuse of human beings. The goal of the study, conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service, was to assess the impact of untreated syphilis on the human body. The methodology required the researchers to systematically ensure that the 399 men enrolled in the study never got treatment for the disease.⁹ The researchers ensured that the participants did not receive treatment, deceived them into believing that they were being treated for “bad blood,” allowed them to unwittingly spread the disease to their sexual partners, precluded them from enrolling in the armed forces, where they would be examined and treated, and blocked them from getting treatment from anywhere else—even after penicillin was proved to be effective and was adopted as a standard of care in the country.

The cruelty and disrespect for an entire community continued even after the barbaric conduct of the Nazis was exposed and condemned during the Nuremberg trials and the subsequent adoption of international declarations of rights to human dignity. The researchers employed by the U.S. Health Service failed to grasp any connection between what they were doing to the African American men in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and what the Nazis were doing when they subjected Jews held in concentration camps to cruel medical experiments. Among the most cruel and notorious medical studies conducted by the Nazis were “fatal experiments on low pressure, exposure to freezing temperatures, and infectious diseases when research could be taken to the point of death.” Moreover, “racial priorities came increasingly to the fore, as exemplified by Schumann’s X-ray sterilization experiments on Jews in Auschwitz.”¹⁰ The results of the studies revealed that the Nazis had completely obliterated any sense of common humanity:

Nearly a quarter of confirmed victims were either killed to obtain their organs for research, or died as a result of experiments taking the research subject to the point of death (notoriously, the experiments on freezing and low pressure at Dachau). The euthanasia killings and executions were sources of bodies for research, and the extent that this happened and research conducted before and after the end of the war is still being documented. Of the fully documented victims 781 died before the end of the war as a result of the experiments: research subjects were weakened by the strain of the experiment such as a deliberate infection or severe cold, or they were deliberately killed because it was feared that they would testify against the perpetrators.¹¹

Nevertheless, Dr. John R. Heller, who served as a chief medical officer for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, offered a vigorous defense of the morality of the experiment and expressed anger and frustration that anyone could not see the difference between the Nazi experiments and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. He responded emphatically that the difference was that there was “no similarity at all between them.”¹²

Egregious violations of dignity are often fueled by a conscious or unconscious bias against a specific group of people. Yet, to recognize the deprivation of human dignity when it occurs, one has to first recognize another person as a human being. Dr. Heller’s failure to see a similarity between the Nazi experiments and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study he was overseeing reflects an ability to blot out a vision of common humanity. At the same time as Dr. Heller defended the morality of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, he saw clearly the horrendous nature of the experiments done by Nazi scientists: “I, like most everybody else, was horrified at the things that were practiced upon the Jewish people, such as doing experiments while the patients were not only alive but doing such things as would cause their deaths.”¹³

The inhumane treatment of people with HIV or AIDS when the HIV virus was first discovered should sensitize us to how easily healthcare can be distorted to reflect social biases. Unfortunately, the public has an extremely short memory about violations of human dignity and needs to be constantly reminded. I have taught healthcare law for forty years. Each year, I ask the students in my class how many have heard of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and each year fewer than 20 percent of them indicate that they have any familiarity with the study. I believe that if we take the time to reflect on these events, looking at historical and current-day cases, we will recognize the need to remain vigilant in identifying and deterring violations of human dignity in medical research and practice.

We should not wait until violations of human dignity occur on a mass basis before we become concerned. There are times when injuries are caused by interactions with the healthcare system that result from conscious abuse or misuse of power or reckless disregard of the interests of others. In those cases, the results are intended, or the risks of their occurrence are consciously disregarded, because the person in power is primarily seeking to achieve a goal that he regards as more important than the potential harm to the victim. It is this type of case that is the subject of this book.

A better understanding of the importance of human dignity in healthcare can help patients, providers, third-party payers, and policy makers develop more effective strategies to protect against abuses and misuses of power. The strategies I advocate flow from the importance of people in power acting with humility. Healthcare professionals, like all other members of the human community who are entrusted with making life-and-death decisions, should consciously acknowledge the importance of respecting the values of vulnerable people who must live with the consequences of the decisions made about their health in terms of both practices and policies. To make respect for others meaningful requires that the person in power pause before acting on any important decision and try to see the world through the eyes of the person who has the most at stake in the encounter. The purpose of the pause is to listen and empathize. In that way the human dignity of another person is respected and affirmed through a shared decision-making process in which the patient holds the trump card.

The meaning and complexity of human dignity in healthcare from a legal perspective will be discussed in detail in chapter 2 and throughout this book. A definition of the essential assets of human dignity from a historical and philosophical perspective as set forth by George Kateb in Human Dignity offers a useful compass: “The core idea of human dignity is that on earth, humanity is the greatest type of beings [sic] … and that every member deserves to be treated in a manner consonant with the high worth of the species.”¹⁴

In the past two decades, a multitude of studies have unveiled persistent inequalities in health and healthcare in America based on race, gender, and ethnicity. In this book, I dive under the statistics and present some stories that show the impact of disparate care on the human dignity of individuals who trusted the healthcare system. My goal in the selection and telling of these stories is not to produce anger or despair, but rather to make apparent some of the forces that must be addressed if we are to maximize protection of vulnerable populations who depend on the healthcare system. The problems of conscious bias, unconscious bias, income inequality, and institutional biases must all be addressed. Recognizing human dignity as a value that warrants the highest consideration and protection can provide critical assistance in making policy decisions.

The stories that introduce each chapter relate the experience of an individual or a family who sought care from a healthcare provider or insurer and encountered a response that assaulted their human dignity. Biases based on gender, sexual orientation, race, and class flow through many of the stories. Each story r...