User:Amorken/medicaltorture

Medical torture describes the involvement and sometimes active participation of medical professionals in acts of torture, either to judge what victims can endure, to apply treatments which will enhance torture, or as torturers in their own right. Medical torture may involve the use of their expert medical knowledge to facilitate interrogation or corporal punishment, in the conduct of torturous human experimentation or in providing professional medical sanction and approval for the torture of prisoners. The term also covers torturous scientific (or pseudo-scientific) experimentation upon unwilling human subjects.

Medical ethics and international law
It is generally accepted that medical torture fundamentally violates medical ethics, which all medical practitioners are expected to adhere to.
 * The Hippocratic Oath makes explicit statements against deliberate harm not in the patient's best interests. These statements are often translated as "I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgement" and "to never deliberately do harm to anyone, for anyone else's interest." (Note: these statements are formulations of the ethical principles of beneficence and non-maleficence.)
 * In response to the Nazi human experimentation on prisoners, which were declared at the Nuremberg Trials to be "crimes against humanity", the World Medical Association developed the Declaration of Geneva to supplant the dated Hippocratic Oath. The Declaration of Geneva requires medical practitioners to state " [I, the medical practitioner] will maintain the utmost respect for human life from its beginning even under threat and I will not use my medical knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity".
 * The Nuremberg Trials also led to the emergence of the Nuremberg code which explicitly outlines the boundaries of acceptable medical experimentation.
 * Additionally in response to the Nazi atrocities, the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 outright prohibits the torture of prisoners of war and other protected non-combatants.
 * The World Medical Association Declaration of Tokyo (1975) makes a number of specific statements against torture, including "The doctor shall not countenance, condone or participate in the practice of torture".

Asserted instances of medical torture

 * Between 1937 and 1945, Japanese medical personnel who were part of Unit 731 participated in the torture killings of as many as 10,000 Chinese and Korean prisoners as well as Allied POWs during the second Sino-Japanese War.
 * During World War II, the Nazi regime in Germany conducted human medical experimentation on large numbers of people held in its concentration camps. In particular, Josef Mengele's experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz earned him the nicknames "the Angel of Death" and "Dr. Death".
 * Japanese surgeons also performed vivisection and other medical experiments to torture American prisoners of war in several islands of the Pacific.
 * Between 1970 and 1971, mentally disorienting interrogation techniques were used against interned prisoners captured in Northern Ireland, including white noise. The Irish government complained to the European Commission for Human Rights, who found Britain guilty of torture; however the higher European Court of Human Rights ruled that the British government's actions were "inhuman and degrading but did not constitute torture".
 * An Israeli medic was convicted of negligence for refusing to treat interrogated Palestinian detainee Mahmud Al-Masri for a burst ulcer, 24 hours before his death on March 6, 1989 at Gaza Prison. It was claimed by pro-Palestinian sources that this constituted medical torture, however this categorisation is disputed by pro-Israeli commentators, and those who consider it dereliction of duty rather than deliberate torture.
 * In 1978, "Pisaot menuh" ("Human Experiments") were performed on seventeen political prisoners held at the infamous prison Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh under the Khmer Rouge.
 * A study called "The aVersion Project" found that gay conscripts in the South African Defense Forces (SADF) during the apartheid era had been forced to submit to "curing" their homosexuality, both by electroshock therapies and by botched sex changes.
 * There have been numerous claims that electroconvulsive therapy and prefrontal lobotomies and similar psychiatric treatments have sometimes been performed not in the patient's best interests, but rather as punishment for misbehaviour or to otherwise make the patient easier to manage. Some claim that such actions constitute medical torture. Some governments (e.g. Norway) have since begun paying reparations to patients who suffered such treatments.

Asserted instances of medical complicity in torture

 * A report in The Lancet states that U.S. military doctors and other medical personnel in Iraq were aware of and complicit in the 2003-2004 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse. According to the article, none of the approximately 70 medical staff who were aware of the abuse reported it prior to the official investigation in January 2004.  It also states that medical staff conspired to cover up the abuse by falsifying medical records and death certificates.
 * The SERE ("Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape") program's chief psychologist, Col. Morgan Banks, issued guidance in early 2003 for the "behavioral science consultants" who helped to devise Guantánamo's interrogation strategy although he has emphatically denied that he had advocated the use of SERE counter-resistance techniques to break down detainees. The New Yorker notes that in November, 2001 Banks was detailed to Afghanistan, where he spent four months at Bagram Air Base, "supporting combat operations against Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters".
 * A 2005 report by Human Rights Watch suggested that torture was routine under the appointed Iraqi government. Human Rights Watch Report
 * Dr. J.C. Carothers, British colonial Kenyan psychiatrist, has been implicated in designing interrogation of Mau Mau prisoners.
 * Similarly, it has been implied that Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Dr. Ayad Allawi violated his obligation to medical ethics whilst serving as Western European chief of secret police for the Baathist government of Saddam Hussein. However, the same sources allege that Allawi had abandoned his medical education at that point and his medical degree "was conferred upon him by the Baath party.".

Medical torture in fiction

 * Actor Michael Palin plays a medical torturer in Director Terry Gilliam's 1985 dark comedic dystopian film Brazil.
 * In the film adaptation of George Orwell's 1984 the main charter played by actor John Hurt is subjected to electroconvulcive torture by the thought police.
 * Actor Gregory Peck plays Nazi medical torturer Josef Mengele in Director Franklin J. Schaffner's The Boys from Brazil.
 * Actor Laurence Olivier plays a Nazi torturer dentist Christian Szell in Director John Schlesinger's 1976 Marathon Man.
 * The film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, starring Jack Nicholson, shows abuse of psychiatric techniques including electro-convulsive therapy and lobotomy.
 * In an episode of the FX series Nip/Tuck, a patient with Munchausen's syndrome has a self-inflicted wound repaired, and during her surgery the anesthesia is replaced with a paralyzing agent, possibly deliberately, which leaves her awake during the entire procedure.