PHLB09H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Blood Pressure, Nuremberg Code, Penicillin
Document Summary
Clinical trials: experiments on human subjects are used to evaluate the safety or efficacy of a medical treatment, most reliable source of information. Ethical challenges: subjects were not informed about the true nature of their condition, they were not informed about being enrolled in the study, they were not provided with essential treatment when it became available. Freedman equipoise and the ethics of clinical trials: clinical trials are a valuable source of knowledge for how to treat illness, question: Clinical trails: suppose that cancer researchers are proposing a new novel therapy, they need people to test this therapy, they need a control group, if a placebo controlled trail was used for a new cancer treatment. If a physician believes that a proposed novel treatment is of equal value to an existing treatment, then it seems permissible to randomize patients to either group. Implications: a placebo-controlled trial should only be used when there are no recognized treatments.
