Things that make you say HMMMM

We watched a film last night - not my usual fare, but it was a medical mystery - and I got taken in . The film was about a doctor, who discovers a plot in hospital to obtain healthy subjects among street-people. The people are then kidnapped and used as test subjects in ground breaking research to regenerate nerves. This kind of research is very real, but still in infancy because it starts as animal testing long before it moves to human trials. And human trials are likely to be far off because of the potential for death and paralysis in such a study.

As I watched the film, more and more people who were involved in the plot had relatives who were in wheelchairs and paralyzed - each scene was more touching than the one before, and secular humanism was rampant - there are no absolute right and wrong things - what is right is what works for me. But that is another post.

Medicine is as much art as science, we use our guts and our hearts if we are at all good at our medical practice. Sometimes it is hard to see through the chance to save someone to the person or animals used in the research to give us the understanding. The Nazi research on hypothermia, which has helped change the way we treat patients - but has some serious ethical issues, comes to mind.

While the scenario is tragic, it begs the question of letting people die in vain, and in this film, that question was answered well, when the research was turned over to someone who would behave ethically and try to make it work. It was the right thing, trying to help people who are hurting, done the wrong way, by taking people by force to have surgical procedures done without their consent. But one character made a point that is sticking with me today. What if you knew that by possibly killing one person, you could cure cancer and save thousands of lives? How far would you go to help someone you love?