When the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment—a long-running deadly and unethical federal study of untreated syphilis among hundreds of poor, Black men in Tuskegee, Ala.—was finally brought to light, it led similarly situated Black men to distrust the medical establishment to the point where they sought less medical care and likely died earlier as a result.
Such are the findings of a new study that seeks to show the aftermath of the revelation of the experiment, formally known as the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.
The experiment, which the study describes as “one of the most egregious examples of medical exploitation in U.S. history,” was conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service from 1932 through 1972, when its existence was exposed by a journalist.
Although treatments, such as penicillin, had become available during the course of the study, the study’s “participants” were denied such treatment and actively discouraged from seeking medical advice from other practitioners, the study states.
The men were told they had “bad blood” for which they believed they were being treated, according to the study. To induce participation in the experiment, the men—many of them poor sharecroppers—were given hot meals, the “guise of treatment,” and burial payments.
“Our estimates indicate that the years following disclosure of the study’s tactics brought significantly lower utilization of both outpatient and inpatient medical care by older black men in closer geographic and cultural proximity to the study’s subjects,” wrote the authors of the study released last month, Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men. “This reduction in healthcare utilization paralleled a significant increase in the probability that such men died before the age of 75.”
Marcella Alsan, assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the study, said the study’s findings have implications for the health of Black men that continue to this day.
