I feel that if the events that happened to the lacks family happened to me or my family i would really care all the much. I mean sure I'd be pretty confused why the doctors didn't let me or my relatives know that this happened but it wouldn't make me sue the living daylight out of everyone in sight.
I can totally understand why the Lack's were extremely mad at the scientists and doctor from the hospital because they just assumed that they were being used. In some ways this was right but for me personally it wouldn't be enough to just up and sue everyone I would be happy that I could help millions of other people.
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Thursday, December 13, 2012
Rhetorical Analysis Paper
Andrew
Russell
Jack
Hennes
ENGL
191-17
September
3, 2012
Rhetorical Analysis Paper
In this paper I will be analyzing a
news article I found about the recent NFL Ref Lockout. The ways that this whole situation has
affected not only the NFL and its players, but also the fans. All of the facts in this and information I
will be discussing and analyzing in this paper will be from this article:
This whole ordeal was happening
pretty much because the NFL wanted to change the way that refs were paid after
retirement. The old style of retirement
for an NFL ref was that they would receive a pension from the NFL that would
help them pay for any expenses that a ref would face after they retired. Rodger Goodell (the commissioner of the NFL)
wanted to change the ref’s retirement plan so that it would be more like a 401k
like plan. The NFLRA (The Nation
Football League Referee Association) didn’t like this new retirement plan
offered by the NFL so they decided to try and make a new plan. The NFL, however, took a
“We-aren’t-going-to-compromise” (nfl.com) stance and wouldn’t accept any ideas or
offers from the refs unless it was the offer that the NFL had stated. This basically caused the entire process to
grind to a complete halt and no progress on the new deal was made for at least
two months. This was all because the NFL wanted to save five million dollars a
year.
Early in August just before the
pre-season the NFLRA and the NFL finally started to somewhat make progress on
the new deal, but it was moving at a snail’s pace. They had spent the better part of a month and
a half still trying to meet an agreement but nothing seemed to be good enough
for ether side. Now the regular season started
without the refs that people were used to seeing around the field; these new
refs had been hired from NCAA and even high school football programs. These new refs were understandably slow at
making calls and sometime would miss the occasional holding call but they
didn’t seem too bad during the pre-season.
The first week of the regular season however wasn’t that clean. The new refs seemed like they couldn’t make a
right call to save their lives; plus they made a three-hour football game into
a four and a half hour game in several cases.
During the first week there were so many blown calls that the NFL had to
issue a statement saying that the refs were understandably nervous. They also added to give the refs another week
to become more comfortable with their new roles and adjust to the new speed of
the same game they’ve been refereeing for years; so that’s what most of America
did.
The next week seemed pretty good and
everything was looking good for the new refs.
Calls were made, there still was the problem with the time of games but
overall the second week went by without a big problem. Most of the people at ESPN weren’t talking
about the refs’ performance but how the players were. This calmness, however, was about to
disappear.
The third week of the regular season
started with high hopes for the ref but by Sunday night this hope was
completely gone. The Saints-Chiefs game
had some of the worst officiating so far this season and the quarterback for
the Saints was about to snap. Other
games this week were bad officiating wise; they couldn’t seem to make a right
call. This cost a few teams extra points
and timeouts but nothing that affected the outcome of a game had occurred
yet. Then came Monday Night Football,
which featured the Green Bay Packers playing the Seattle Seahawks. There were some extremely questionable calls
during this game that caused some of the halftime review to focus on the
officiating so far instead of the actual game performance. Then with zero seconds left in the 4th
quarter, the quarterback for the Seahawks threw a Hail Mary Pass to the back of
the endzone. The ball appeared to have
been caught at the same time by a Green Bay cornerback and a Seattle receiver;
they showed the play in slow motion and it showed that the cornerback for Green
Bay had intercepted the football. Packers win, game over right? Nope.
The officials in the booth took ten minutes to review the play and ruled
that the receiver had actually CAUGHT the ball therefore Seattle just scored
the game-winning touchdown. Everyone was
shocked at the call and even some Seattle players couldn’t believe the
call. On the other side of the football
Green Bay were beyond furious at the completely blown call, so much that the
entire team and the coaching staff had left the field and refused to come out
for the extra point. Green Bay’s head
coach had said that the entire game was “complete chaos”(source). When the game was finally over it was almost
unanimous that that play was completely missed; there even was blatant pass
interference on one of Green Bay’s safeties that wouldn’t ended the game
anyways. All of the talk was about the
last play and the ref’s poor officiating not the football game.
The effects of these events caused a lot
of people to begin boycotting NFL gear and games. People stopped buying NFL game packages for
TV just to show the NFL that this ref situation needed to be dealt with now. Players also got in on the action using
social media sites such as twitter to voice their opinions. For example, T.J. Lang of the Green Bay
Packers posted on his Twitter account after the controversial call of the
Packers-Seahawks game “Got F*cked by the refs.. Embarrassing. Thanks nfl” (Twitter). This whole situation seemed to just spiral
out of control for three days following the Green Bay-Seattle game until finally
the NFL announced it had come to an agreement with the NFLRA officially ending
the Ref Lockout.
Analyzing this article by using Ethos, I
would have to say that it contains almost no Ethos. The majority of this article is about the
facts of what happened during most of this ref lockout so it steers clear of
using emotional opinions to tell this story.
I could be said that the fans and players would’ve had a very emotional
response to this happening but this article doesn’t use Ethos as a way to
relate to the reader.
Using Pathos, it can be said that this
article uses a very large amount of Pathos throughout the article. It uses numbers such as monetary figures and
years to explain the ref’s new retirement and salary deal. An example of this would be the following
quote from the article: “Apart from their benefit
package, the game officials' compensation will increase from an average of
$149,000 per year in 2011 to $173,000 in 2013, rising to $205,000 by 2019”
(NFL.com). I found that Pathos was used
the most frequently in this article.
Finally, using Logos to
analyze this article that it was used quite a bit also. This article is full of logic, which is
assumed since it is a news article by NFL.com (whom I trust to give the full
details). All it really states is the
facts about the lockout so the entire article is pretty much logical.
In this paper I have
analyzed an article from NFL.com about the recent NFL Referee Lockout and how
its effect on the people and players.
Using Rhetorical thinking, I have established that this article contains
almost no Ethos because it lacks emotion.
It contains a large amount of Logos since it uses logic to explain what
has happened and it contains a large amount of Pathos because it uses number
and statistic. Overall I used this
article because it was from a very trusted source that is NFL.com. It is also a very close topic to me since I
am a die-hard Green Bay Packer fan and I was completely outraged by the
Seahawk-Packer game’s refereeing. Mainly
however, I am just a football fan and I am happy to see the regular referees
back on the field.
"NFL, Referees Reach Agreement; Refs
Back on Field Thursday." NFL.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Oct. 2012.
Researched Argumentive Paper
Andrew
Russell
Jack
Hennes
11-19-12
ENGL
191
Informed Consent Argument
Ever since humans have discovered what causes
diseases, there has been a struggle to find cures and prevention methods to
combat these sometimes-deadly diseases.
This leads to new vaccines and treatments being created by doctors and
scientists for the general population.
However, once a vaccine is created it first must be tested to make sure
it doesn’t have negative or ever life threatening side effects. Due to the enormous controversy about testing
a potentially dangerous vaccine on a living human being, scientists and doctors
needed to find alternative test subjects.
There were in some cases people that were willing to risk their own
bodies by allowing scientists to test these vaccines on them, doctors couldn’t
usually find enough people willing to risk their health. This led to doctors in some hospitals to
begin taking samples of people for testing without the patient’s knowing or
consent. This was very prevalent in
inner city hospitals due to the large majority of patients being poor. This was the case with Henrietta Lacks. Her cancer cells were unknowingly taken from
her and made into a multi-billion dollar program.
This
leads me into my main point. I believe
that all people have the right to know what is being taken from their bodies
and they have the right to control how the material taken from their bodies are
used. I also feel that people have the
right to receive royalties from any monetary gains from any part of
themselves.
Here’s
a little background on informed consent.
Informed consent is used in the medical field as a connection by the
doctors to the patient. This can be done
in many different ways but is usually obtained by a doctor in paper form since
it is the legal norm. According to
ama-assn.org, one of these forms includes: the process of treatment, the risks
and benefits of the treatment, the patient’s diagnosis, the risks and benefits
of not getting treatment, and alternatives to this particular treatment. Once a patient agrees to this form, they have
the right to ask questions anytime about the treatment they are receiving and
doctors have the permission to do everything the patient just agreed to. If, however, the doctors do something to the
patient that they didn’t agree too in the informed consent form, the patient
has the legal right to sue the doctors and the hospital for malpractice.
In
cases such as Henrietta Lack’s where her rights were completely disregarded for
her cancer cells. Although because of
this disregard for a patient’s rights, her cancer cells revolutionized cell
research. The fact that this
even happened helped saved
millions of lives, but it was still wrong to do. Henrietta went into Hopkins to get treatment
for her cervical cancer. While she was
sedated for the procedure, the doctors cut a sample of her tumor and sent it
into the lab. Her cancer cells from that
tumor began to grow at an astonishing rate that no one had ever seen before;
scientists were shocked. This led to the
creation of the HeLa cell line, which was used to create a vaccine for polio
and a host of other major diseases. The
very fact that the polio isn’t an active disease anymore is because of the HeLa
cell line. This still doesn’t make what
the doctors at Hopkins did to Henrietta Lacks morally or legally justifiable.
Another
case like Henrietta’s would be the other case that is talked about in the book,
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”.
This case involved a surveyor on the Alaskan Pipeline named John Moore a
man who was just 32 years old. He was
diagnosed with hairy-cell leukemia, which is a very rare and extremely deadly
form on cancer that affects the spleen.
This disease caused Moore’s kidneys to fill with malignant blood cells
and also caused his gums to bleed and bruises to form all over his body. He thought these symptoms were from his
job. When he found out that he was
actually dying from leukemia, he flew down the UCLA to seek treatment from
David Golde a cancer researcher. Golde
told Moore that the only thing that he could
do to treat him was remove his
entire spleen. Moore signed the consent
form, which gave permission to the hospital to “dispose of any severed tissue
or member by cremation”. After the
surgery, Moore went on with his
life but every couple month he had to fly back for follow up treatments. Moore didn’t think much of the follow up
trips until he was given another consent form which stated “I (do or do not)
voluntarily grant the University of California all rights I, or my heirs, may
have in any cell line or any other potential product which may be developed
from the blood and/or bone marrow obtained from me” (Skloot 200). When Moore read this, he signed “do not”
thinking that Golde wasn’t telling him the whole story and went home. After being harassed by Golde for a few weeks
by letter and phone calls, Moore called his lawyer. It turns out the Golde was using the follow
up treatments to market Moore’s cell line into something like HeLa was which he
called “Mo”. This of course was not
mentioned the first consent form he had signed which stated that any tissue
taken from Moore would be cremated. This
was not the case and his cells from his spleen were marketed without his
knowledge.
What
Golde had found in the cells from Moore’s spleen was that they produced a rare
protein that pharmaceutical companies could use to possible cure cancer. They also apparently contained the virus
HTLV, which is a distant
cousin to the HIV virus and
scientists thought that it could be used in a vaccine to cure the HIV/AIDS
virus completely. Companies were willing
to pay out the ears to get their hands on Moore’s cells and when Golde found
this out he immediately tried to patent and sell the cells all without telling
Moore.
Another
case like Moore’s would be Ted Slavin a man that had hemophilia and when he
went into the doctors for treatment doctors found that his cells were creating
something rare. Only when the doctors
found this they told Salvin and gave him the say in whether or not he would
like to market his cells. He said yes
and his cells were used to create a vaccine for hepatitis B, which saved
millions of lives. This story is a good
example of how proper informed consent procedure should carried out in a real
world setting since it follows exactly how I believe it should go. The doctors only have the right to do what
the patient agrees to let the doctor do on them.
This next case covers
doctors going against a parent’s will for a procedure done on a child. Vera Delgato had just given birth to a child
and usually when a child is born they get circumcised. Vera’s son was placed in the intensive care
unit due to some medical condition that caused a life threatening
infection. According to Miami Herald, “Vera
had specifically refused to sign a consent form for circumcision, telling
doctors that she did not want Mario to have the procedure. No male in her
family had had the operation in generations.”
A few days later Vera found out that while being treated for his
infection, her son had had a circumcision.
Vera was furious saying “I didn’t want this for him. I’m opposed to
circumcision. They didn’t have the right to do it” (Miami Herald). She’s right, the doctors didn’t have the
right to do this procedure on her son. To
make things worse the doctors just wrote it off as “an unfortunate mistake”
(Miami Herald). Through all this trouble
some people think that all of this trouble can be avoid by just getting rid of
the informed consent law entirely.
The main argument against
having this informed consent law is that it could potentially prevent a
life-threatening condition to go untreated due to ether the ignorance or faith
in another “healing” method. An example
of this would be the story of Shannon and David Hickmen. According to cristianpost.com editor Ray
Downs, the couple “have been charged with manslaughter for relying solely on
faith rather than seeking medical care when their premature child grew ill and
died after being born at home.” The
couple decided to pray for God to heal the child rather than tae him in to a
hospital for medical attention. Both of
them belong to the Followers of Christ church, which is a very controversial
church sect. Doctors said that if the
couple would’ve taken their baby in to get medical attention, there would have
been a “99.9 percent chance that David would have survived” (Downs). Another story involving this topic would be
fellow church members Timothy and Rebecca Wylan. The couple “were arrested and
convicted of criminal misconduct and sentenced to 90 days in jail for not
taking their infant daughter to a doctor for a growth that almost destroyed her
left eye” (Downs). This caused a huge
debate on First Amendment rights in this community but what it really brought
up was informed consent too. Some argue
that if there wasn’t a law preventing people to allow themselves or their child
to receive medical treatment cases like this wouldn’t happen at all.
In conclusion, I have
showed you several stories and cases about informed consent. You’ve read about Henrietta Lack’s story and
how her cells were taken from her without her knowledge. You’ve read how this is affecting her family
even today.
You’ve read about the case of John Moore and how
he became ill and had to have his spleen removed. Then his doctor made a cell line out of his
cells without telling Moore and pretty much made a lot of money. You’ve also read about Ted Slavin and how
when his doctor found out about his rare cell line he told Slavin. Slavin then made his own cell line and helped
create the first vaccine for hepatitis B that saved millions of lives. You also heard about the case of Vera Delgato
and how the doctors went against her blessings and circumcised her son. Then the doctors basically wrote it off as
“our bad” and didn’t really seem to care all that much for Vera’s
feelings. You then heard about some
cases that argued against having an informed consent law. The case of Shannon and David Hickmen where
their newborn son was born two months premature and instead of taking him into
the hospital, David started to pray.
Nine hours later the newborn died of complications and the parents were
arrested and charged with manslaughter. Finally,
there’s the case of Timothy and Rebecca Wylan where they were arrested and
sentenced to 90 days in jail for allowing a growth the form on their daughter’s
eye which almost destroyed her eye.
In this paper I’ve
stated my stance on Informed Consent and how I believe that it is vital to
society. Not only does it protect the
patients of America, it stops any unwanted procedure from being done on
you. However as you can tell there still
are problems with doctors that purposely or mistakenly do not follow these
laws. Doctors have stolen tissue, cells,
and body parts while people were under the knife. I believe that all people have the right to
know what is being taken from their bodies and they
have the right to control how the material taken
from their bodies are used. Also people
have the right to receive royalties from any monetary gains from any part of
themselves. It doesn’t matter if a certain
procedure would save anyone else’s or my life.
If the patient doesn’t agree on what’s going to happen to their own body
they have the right to not allow it to happen.
As long as new diseases and old diseases keep killing people, there will
be a need for medical research. That
means there will need to be testing for new procedures done on people, which is
fine. As long as they agree to
participate on paper I won’t have a problem with it, and neither will the law.
Work Sited:
Skloot,
Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York City: Crown,
2010. Print.
Downs,
Ray. "CP N.America." Christian Post. Christian Post, 28 Nov.
2012. Web. 28 Nov. 2012.
<http://www.christianpost.com/news/faith-healing-scandal-parents-prayed-instead-of-seeking-medical-care-as-child-slowly-died-56743/>.
Perconti,
Levin. "Illinois Medical Malpractice Blog." Lack of Informed
Consent ::. Illinois Informed Consent Blog, 7 Dec. 2010. Web. 28 Nov. 2012.
<http://medicalmalpractice.levinperconti.com/lack_of_informed_consent/>.
Informed
Consent." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 23 Nov. 2012. Web. 28
Nov. 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_consent>.
"Health
Sciences South Carolina." Health Sciences South Carolina. Health
Sciences South Carolina, n.d. Web. 28 Nov. 2012.
<http://www.healthsciencessc.org/IT.asp>.
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Research Paper Sources
This source seems pretty creditable
and it has a lot of good information.
I know this is Wikipedia but I can
use it to find basic information about informed consent.
This is a very credible source I
found a link to on Wikipedia and it goes into depth about the reasoning behind
informed consent.
This is an actually law that was
put in place in order to protect patients rights and it has very detailed
information about this topic.
Monday, November 5, 2012
Research Paper Proposal
For my paper, I would like to write about Informed Content in the medical field. My goal would be to explore some background information about this topic. Then eventually argue my point that Informed Consent should be required for any type of medical testing and a person should know what their body is going to exactly be used for. I chose this topic because it seemed very interesting and I don’t know a lot about it. I guess some possible subtopics to this would be stem cell research, doctor malpractice and ethics. This is my proposal for this paper.
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