Global Pulse Blog

As a participant in the May 18th medical student day of action with the New York Coalition Against Torture, I would like to thank our readers for their support — whether in coming to Albany, contacting their NY state representatives, or signing the PHR petition. The event was very successful and inspiring, and  we have received a lot of positive feedback. I look forward to updating the GPJ community on the effort’s progress. In the meantime, I have a more detailed review of the event at the ACLU’s blog:

During the white-coat advocacy day on Tuesday, the medical student group conducted over 25 meetings with lawmakers and staff, met with the bill’s sponsors, and hand-delivered copies of the petition signed by hundreds of their peers and fellow New York State residents. They also conveyed the support of state and national professional organizations for this landmark legislation…(more)

The medical student action event was also mentioned on the Huffington Post and on PHR’s Health Rights Advocate blog. Since then, NYCAT has also released a letter of support for the Gottfried-Duane Bill signed by prominent leaders of medicine in New York state, including medical school deans, hospital CEOs, and Nobel Prize laureates.

Medical students and NYCAT members with Assemblyman Gottfried in Albany

Related reading:

• ACLU’s resources on torture
• The National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT)
• NRCAT, ACLU, and PHR: Working together against inhumane detention conditions at home?

UPDATE [06-08-2010]: PHR’s newest report, Experiments In Torture, raises concerns that the actions of CIA doctors who participated in waterboarding and other methods amounted to illegal human experimentation. Read coverage of the report in The New York Times and commentary at The Washington Post and The Atlantic.

Looking for ways to get involved closer to home? NRCAT has a list of events across the country for the month of June.

Related: China bans the use of torture in extracting confessions.

There are a couple excellent entries on the PHR’s Health Rights Advocate blog regarding recent evidence about the participation of American medical professionals in torture.  Scott Allen, MD, writes:

Health professional supervision of torture is one of the gravest affronts to medical ethics and is illegal under both domestic and international anti-torture law. Danner’s disclosure of the ICRC report on detainee treatment in CIA custody is shocking but not suprising. For years evidence has been mounting through news articles, government investigations, and even the statements of Bush Administration officials that health professionals were centrally complicit in the breaking of bodies and minds at the black sites, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere.

All of this was in the bad old days of WMDs, flag-waving, and Blackwater. . . right?  Not so fast, writes Sara Greenberg.

Something about this really gets under my skin.

As student doctors, we are given so much.  We are given amazing knowledge, the product of an entire history of human civilization and learning about the human body and mind; the time and experience of our mentors; and the unbounded kindness of our patients, who allow us to touch them and to learn from them, even at the risk of harming them by our inexperience or error.  We are given all these things in trust, to use in the remainder of our professional lives to heal and to help.  A medical professional who knowingly uses his or her knowledge to help violate another person’s body and autonomy has broken that trust, and broken it for all of us: past and present and future.

As evidence of medical participation in war crimes continues to accumulate, American medical professionals need to do some serious soul-searching.  I believe this applies to all of us — including those who have never seen the inside of a black site, voted for the Democrats every time, or are still in training — because somehow, our medical system obviously had produced a significant number of physicians who had no problem assisting in torture.  What kind of professional climate was it, that made that possible?  We need to make sure that the next generation of physicians, psychologists, and allied health professionals, are absolutely 100% positively sure, that it is not okay to do this.  We need to talk about it clearly and transparently, so that we may begin to rehabilitate some of that trust.

I leave all you fellow future physicians with this excerpt from a 2006 editorial from Time by Andrew Sullivan:

After a while, you get numb reading these stories. They read like accounts of a South American dictatorship, not an American presidency. But we learn one thing: once you allow the torture of prisoners for any reason, as this President did, the cancer spreads. In the end it spreads to healers as well, and turns them into accomplices to harm.