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Evidence, Belief, and Action: The Failure of Equipoise to Resolve the Ethical Tension in the Randomized Clinical Trial

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Deborah Hellman
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Extract

Clinical research employing the randomized clinical trial has, traditionally, been understood to pose an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, each patient ought to get the treatment that best meets her needs, as judged by the patient in consultation with her doctor. On the other hand, the method most helpful to advancing our understanding about what treatments are indeed best able to meet patient needs is the randomized trial, which necessitates that each patient's care is decided not by physician judgment or patient choice but instead by random assignment. The tension can be described as a conflict between the interests of individual patients who are sick today, and the interests of the group of people who will become sick in the future and would benefit from advances in medical understanding. How one ought to balance these important and often competing interests is an important ethical question that resists easy resolution.

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Article
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , Fall 2002 , pp. 375 - 380
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2002

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References

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