Case Study Of Ewen Cameron’S Abuse Of Power
Today it is known that Dr. Ewen Cameron trusted he could cure schizophrenia and find a way to brainwash patients by giving substantial amounts of electrical shock treatments, administering LSD to his patients and insulin-induced comas. These treatments created serious memory loss for the individuals. A few patients were given insulin than were placed in a trance-like state and some were asleep for quite a long time where recorded messages were played up to 16 hours per day. The point was to reinvent the psyche so there was no remnant of their mental illness.
In the late 70s, an emotional discovery was made that the Allen Memorial had been a part of a cold war program of mentally conditioning trials paid for, to some extent, by the CIA. The Fifth Estate uncovered the size of these experiments and that the patients were never told the treatment was a piece of a CIA experiment. Most patients felt the same about Cameron in the beginning. They claimed he was kind and caring but had an ego, as he knew he was well known in his field. Yet, they all claim that over time things changed and he performed non-consensual treatments on them, which impacted their minds forever. This violates the first point of the Nuremberg Code that “Required is the voluntary, well-informed, understanding consent of the human subject in a full legal capacity”. Author Ann Collins claims that most patients claimed that he was "extraordinarily charismatic, a striver, opinion maker, and leader", but only at first. Afterward, they mostly felt betrayed and angry. Patients claim consent was never given as did not describe the treatments and he did not clarify what was going to happen. It was a paternalistic kind of doctor-patient relationship as he told them the treatment would work and he'd send them up for treatment with no explanations.
Overall, Cameron’s coworkers all had similar ideas of him professionally. Like his colleague Peter Roper, a former nurse, they knew him as “a man of integrity, capable, hard-working and, if the occasion required, mulish if he believed he was right or wanted to get things done”. Roper still admired him after his death and says we'd have a totally different picture of Cameron if he were alive to defend himself. Cameron’s rationale was controversial as he went against most of the points in the Nuremberg Code. The experiments were not voluntary, positive, experimented previously, they did harm the patients nor benefit them, there was no risk protection, no way of leaving at your own accord and no one stopped the risky experimentations. This violates nine out of ten of the points except for the one that details the staff must be qualified to do the experiment, which can be debated as he is a Doctor.
All in all, the abuse of power that Ewen Cameron took on was detrimental to the majority of his patients. Until these patients and their families are properly compensated the issue of this landmark case will never be put to rest. Cameron never acted in a moral manner and his experiments will forever influence the field of medicine and proper doctor-patient relationships.
