Therapeutic Injections: Cons & Pros Essay
Debates over the ethics of embryonic stem cell research have divided scientists, politicians, and religious groups for years.Therapeutic Injections: Cons & Pros Essay
However, promising developments in other areas of stem cell research have led to solutions that help bypass these ethical barriers and win more support from those against embryonic stem cell research; the newer methods don’t require the destruction of blastocysts.Therapeutic Injections: Cons & Pros Essay
Many parties continue to have strong opinions that trigger ongoing debates about stem cell research, and the following pros and cons provide a snapshot of some the points on each side of the issue.
Pros
- Medical benefits such as regenerating organ tissue and therapeutic cell cloning
- May hold the answer to curing various diseases, including Alzheimer’s, certain cancers and Parkinson’s
- Research potential for human cell growth and development to treat a variety of ailments Therapeutic Injections: Cons & Pros Essay
- Possibility of use for embryonic treatment
- Requires only a small number of cells because of the fast replication rate
Cons
- The difficulty of obtaining stem cells and the long period of growth required before use
- Unproven treatments often come with high rejection rates
- Cost can be prohibitive for many patients
- Ethical controversy over use of stem cells from lab-fertilized human eggs
- Additional ethical issues regarding the creation of human tissues in a lab, such as cloning
Pros
The excitement about stem cell research is primarily due to the medical benefits in areas of regenerative medicine and therapeutic cloning. Stem cells provide huge potential for finding treatments and cures to a vast array of medical issues:
- Different diseases—including cancers, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and more—can be treated with stem cells by replacing damaged or diseased tissue. This can include neurons that might affect neurological diseases and even entire organs that need to be replaced.
- There is endless potential for scientists to learn about human growth and cell development from studying stem cells. For example, by studying how stem cells develop into specific types of cells, scientists potentially could learn how to treat or prevent relevant ailments.
- One of the areas of potential is embryonic treatment. This stage of pregnancy is when many birth defects or other potential issues begin. Studying embryonic stem cells possibly could lead to a better understanding of how embryos develop and maybe even lead to treatments that can identify and address potential problems.
- Because the cells can replicate at a high rate, a limited number of initial cells eventually can grow into a much greater number to be studied or used in treatment.Therapeutic Injections: Cons & Pros Essay
Cons
Stem cell research presents problems like any form of research, but most opposition to stem cell research is philosophical and theological, focusing on questions of whether we should be taking science this far:Therapeutic Injections: Cons & Pros Essay
- It’s not easy to obtain stem cells. Once harvested from an embryo, stem cells require several months of growth before they can be used. Obtaining adult stem cells, such as from bone marrow, can be painful.
- As promising as the field is, stem cell treatments still are unproven, and they often have high rejection rates.
- The cost also can be prohibitive for many patients, with a single treatment costing well into the thousands of dollars, as of 2018.
- The use of embryonic stem cells for research involves the destruction of blastocysts formed from laboratory-fertilized human eggs. For those who believe that life begins at conception, the blastocyst is a human life, and to destroy it is unacceptable and immoral.
- A similar theological problem is an idea of creating living tissue in a laboratory and whether that represents humans taking on the role of God. This argument also applies to the potential for human cloning. For those who believe God created people, the prospect of people creating people is troublesome.Therapeutic Injections: Cons & Pros Essay
In response to the opioid epidemic, several cities, from New York City to Seattle, are considering a controversial policy: allowing spaces where people can, under supervision, inject heroin and use other drugs. The idea is that if people are going to use drugs anyway, there might as well be places where those using drugs can be supervised in case something goes wrong.
“After a rigorous review of similar efforts across the world, and after careful consideration of public health and safety expert views, we believe overdose prevention centers will save lives and get more New Yorkers into the treatment they need to beat this deadly addiction,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement earlier this year.
But a new study has found that these places, known as supervised drug consumption sites, safe injection sites, and many other names, may not be as effective at preventing overdose deaths and other drug-related problems as once thought. According to a new review of the research published in the International Journal of Drug Policy, safe consumption sites appear to have only a small favorable relation to drug-related crimes but no significant effect on several other outcomes, including overdose mortality and syringe sharing.
“The contrast between the claims that are being made and what the evidence actually says” stuck out to Keith Humphreys, a drug policy expert at Stanford University who was not involved in the review. The new research review’s results, he said, “are fairly disappointing.”
In the past, experts, advocates, and journalists (including myself) have said that supervised consumption sites have a lot of evidence supporting them — pointing to past reviews of the research that concluded the sites are effective in several areas. But this latest review of the research is more rigorous than those done before it, and it detected little to no effect from supervised consumption sites in the best studies the researchers could find.
That is not to definitively say that supervised consumption sites don’t work; it’s more that we simply don’t know yet. One of the problems the review found is that the research is seriously lacking in this area. Out of the dozens of studies on the topic they found, the researchers concluded that only eight were rigorous and transparent enough to include in the review. With such a small pool of studies included, it’s possible — maybe even likely — that these few studies were in some ways biased, so future research could produce entirely different findings.
As a result, several experts who support supervised consumption sites said that the new review of the research is fundamentally flawed. “They excluded, almost systematically, a lot of the studies that had demonstrated benefits on the metrics that they have selected,” Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University, told me.
The review does not show that supervised consumption sites lead to, as detractors claim, more drug use and crime. In fact, the findings speak against that, if anything, as the sites appear to be linked to slightly lower drug-related crime.Therapeutic Injections: Cons & Pros Essay
But the review indicates that the sites are not as evidence-based as supporters often claim, and more research is needed to reach hard conclusions about supervised consumption sites one way or the other.
What the new review of the research found
The new review of the research, from Tom May, Trevor Bennett, and Katy Holloway at the University of South Wales in the UK, was a standard meta-analysis. The researchers first searched for previous studies on supervised drug consumption sites, pulling out 40, most of which looked at sites in Vancouver, Canada, and Sydney, Australia.
They then tried to weed out the weaker studies — meaning, in scientific terms, those that didn’t provide fully replicate data and those that didn’t have a comparison group. That left them with eight studies total.Therapeutic Injections: Cons & Pros Essay
The researchers then looked through the eight studies to measure the possible effects of the sites on several outcomes, including ambulance attendances relating to opioid-related events, overdose mortality, drug-related crime, borrowing or sharing syringes and injecting equipment, and problematic heroin use or injection.
Ultimately, the researchers concluded that supervised consumption sites had no significant effect on most outcomes. The sites only had a small favorable relation with drug-related crimes, and a small unfavorable association to problematic heroin use or injection.