In Medicine, Students Are Required to Perform Many Practices That May Harm Patients in — Jurisprudential Answers — Miscellaneous Issues, Vol. 2

Ahmed al-Hasan Response:

May God grant you success and make your steps firm. The general course of modern medicine is beneficial to people's bodies. Were it not for these vaccines and chemical treatments, which may sometimes carry some harm, the population of Earth would not have reached seven billion. The presence of harmful substances in a particular treatment does not cancel its benefit and does not mean that it must be avoided. Many foods we eat contain lethal toxins; this is why we need the liver, kidneys, and excretory system to rid ourselves of these toxic substances, yet we do not refrain from eating food. It is permissible to study medicine in medical colleges according to the curricula established by the specialist professors of those colleges, and it is also permissible to practice medicine and to use medicines and treatments even when they carry some potential harm alongside the benefit they provide. It is permissible to conduct therapeutic experiments on human beings when necessary even if there is a possibility that the experiment may cause death, provided that the patient voluntarily consents to undergo the experiment, such as experiments involving gene therapy for hemophilia, cancer, and similar conditions. It is permissible to conduct experiments on embryonic stem cells even if doing so causes the embryos to be killed, on condition that the embryos are cloning embryos produced from donors, that they are in the first days of development before the embryo begins to take form, and that embryos produced by fertilization of an ovum by sperm are not used. It is also permissible to produce parts of the human body—such as a liver, heart, or eye—in the laboratory from embryonic stem cells taken from a cloned embryo made from a particular person and then implant those parts into that same person.