Assessment of Ethical Compliance of Handling and Usage of the Human Body in Anatomical Facilities of Ethiopian Medical Schools

Abstract

Background: Human anatomy has historically been a cornerstone in medical education and is special in that it uses human remains kept in various anatomical facilities like a morgue, gross anatomy laboratory, or museums for instruction and research. While serving knowledge advancement facilitating clinical practice and research, human cadaver handling, and usage at all levels, such as cadaver sourcing, transportation, storage, preservation, dissection, and final disposal deserves in return the utmost respect. In Ethiopia, even though there is not enough information on when, where, and by whom the first cadaver dissection was conducted, dissection is being conducted in many of its medical schools. Despite ethical necessity surrounding human body usage in every anatomical setting, there is still ethical and legal uncertainty due to several challenging barriers which is severe in developing nations including Ethiopia. The aim of this study is, therefore, to assess ethical practices of handling and usage of the human body to promote, in the near future, formulation and implementation of acceptable, respectful, and ethical guidelines for the anatomy dissection laboratories and related settings in Ethiopia. Methods:A multicentered cross-sectional study was used at selected anatomy facilities of eight Ethiopian medical schools. The collected data through structured questionnaires and checklists were cleaned, preset and entered in to SPSS version 20 for analysis. Internal consistency and reliability were measured by using Cronbach's alpha. Results: The study result showed vivid human body ethical breaches that ranged from lack of power by anatomy unit to oversee the process during sourcing, transportation, embalming, caring, and dissection of cadavers in the anatomy laboratories to student's mistreatment of cadavers. Conclusion:In addition to lack of compliance due to lack of standard ethical guidelines or policies regarding human body usage, the compliance-based professional development is also nonexistent. The ethical way of body sourcing is through body donation; however, in Ethiopia, anatomy teaching exclusively depends on unclaimed bodies. Using a body for dissection that is solely sourced unethically may generate a negative emotional sense of life for anatomy instructors, technical assistants, morticians, and medical students. We inspire better provision of moral and ethical exercise with the good practice concerning the human body through recognizing the humanity and uniqueness of the deceased person. The results of this study serve as a serious condemnation of practices in Ethiopian anatomy facilities and we urge the Anatomical Society of Ethiopia to play its part in changing the present practices related to ethical and legal uncertainty of the human body usage.

The impact of enhancing publicity and commemoration of body donors at Zhengzhou University, China

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“…Historically, to avoid invasive in vivo measurements in humans, cadaveric data is used to provide generic model information, leading to challenges related to scalability, limits of practical applicability, cost, and ethical compliance (Fischer et al 2019; Tesfaye et al 2021). Over the last few decades, thanks to technological advances, some research groups have come to perform some internal in vivo measurements, such as 3D bone geometry from medical images (Stephen et al 2021), joint kinematics through fluoroscopy (Stiehl et al 1995), contact forces between femur and tibia by means of instrumented implants (Stansfield et al 2003; Fregly et al 2012; D’Lima et al 2005; Kutzner et al 2010; Taylor et al 2017) or, more recently, tendon forces with shear wave tensiometers (Martin et al 2018).…”

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“…All these methods imply ethical restrictions and access to clinical resources, which can delay, limit, or prohibit a substantial part of the research community when trying to generate significant new advances in the field. Additionally, the use of cadaveric data to derive generic model information also poses challenges related to scalability, practical applicability limits, and cost [18,19]. Given the limitations mentioned above, some researchers opted to validate their results by comparing them with experimental data reported in the literature [4,12,16].…”