That's the issue with scientific research, there's a method to it. You can't rule out outside factors with the data obtained from real cases.
Lore, myth and religion have also taught us to hate people different from us, they've taught us men are more important than women, they've taught us it's perfectly fine to murder children if god wills it, etc. They're really not that reliable a source of information!
I'll leave history out of that one because history doesn't usually have a specific thing it wants to transmit. It's merely facts (according to whoever wrote that specific bit of history) open to interpretation and full of lessons to be extracted from it.
Honestly, it's not like these studies seek to prove it's bad to touch children, that much is obvious. Learning how the human body and mind work is what helps medicine and other related fields advance. That said, don't misunderstand me, I wouldn't condone doing this kind of thing to children for science. Regrettably, that's where the rats come in...
By the by, I am not throwing the baby out with the bath water regarding all science is bad. Although many do this with religions, as if everything in religion is horrible. I understand the scientific method is a tool and nothing more. I like science and I have a inquiring mind. I just don't like greed and politics involved in science, but that is whimsical feeling, this is the way the world works. So I always question science, since it is not a religion and science is based on questions.
Science has also taught us to hate people, like the science of racism, although now called pseudoscientific. Old lore and myth are ways of teaching people what is good and not good. There are many areas in life that are gray and cannot be measured and science dislikes things it cannot measure, that's why philosophy was caste out of both science and religion walked away from their love of Sophia, casting her out and learned to walk on their own. Now both are full of knowledge but do not know how to use their knowledge correctly.
...as if a human is a rat or a rat is a human.
Than there have been many studies that have used humans just like rats and I am talking about right now, not in the dark past of science where there was no regard for the well being of the scientist or their human test subjects.
No one talks about what happens to the scientist that have to carry out these kind of experiments. The science of jerking off baby rats and measuring the growth of their little brains and genitals.
Our past==> Unethical human experimentation in the United States
I love this old man, he reminds me of Santa Claus (Frithjof Schoun)The man who wishes to know the visible -to know it both in entirety and in depth - is obliged for that very reason to know the Invisible, on pain of absurdity and ineffectualness; to know it according to the principles which the very nature of the Invisible imposes on the human mind; hence to know it by being aware that the solution to the contradictions of the objective world is found only in the transpersonal essence of the subject, namely in the pure Intellect.
Despite these regulations, researchers at leading medical schools and hospitals across the U.S. continue to conduct unethical human experiments with alarming frequency, with the results of many of these studies appearing in prestigious medical journals such as the NEJM.