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PRINCIPLES REGARDING HUMAN RESEARCH PARTICIPANTS

The American Medical Student Association:

1.             SUPPORTS the concept that extra precautions must be undertaken to ensure that human participants in experiments give fully voluntary and informed consent and be educated as to the foreseeable consequences of such experiments;

2.             SUPPORTS the concept that the welfare of the person must be considered as more valuable than experiment results;

3.             ENDORSES the continuing efforts of the Department of Health and Human Services to review and recommend comprehensive research policies where human experimentation is involved;

4.             AFFIRMS, in principle, nontherapeutic experimentation on human volunteers; however, URGES the prohibition of nontherapeutic experimentation involving prisoners and/or patients involuntarily committed to mental hospitals; all therapeutic experimentation must receive prior review and full approval from a board, complying with federal guidelines on human experimentation, charged with assessing the adequacy of scientific controls and the satisfaction of recognized ethical standards for research;

5.             OPPOSES the use of Third World populations as experimental subjects to test devices, drugs, or procedures, such as contraceptives, without adherence to the guidelines of Human Experimentation, including informed consent in the patient’s native language, as established by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

6.             REGARDS notification of affected individuals to be a right of the individual and a responsibility of the scientific investigator whenever significant scientific study, as reviewed by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, finds individuals to be at increased risk of disease.  Notification must include adequate explanation of the meaning of these results to the patient in language that the patient understands within the limits of available knowledge, along with referral to an appropriate health-care professional who can provide this explanation. (1985)

7.             OBJECTS to the treatment of human research subjects in such a way as to be substandard to currently accepted treatment.  No one should be denied such treatment based on the economic conditions of the region of study or inability to obtain such treatment whether or not the study was conducted. (1998)

8.             ENCOURAGES the struggle of all health professionals to uphold in principle the highest standards of health care through combining beneficial advances in the art and science of medicine sensitive to the specific culture of the people whom they are serving. (1998)