The Ethics of Clinical Trials and the Placebo Effect

Source: alzinfo.com

As an aspiring physician, one of the aspects of the scientific field that I have found most fascinating is medical research. However, this fascination forces me to acknowledge the ethically-challenging issue that that many researchers have come across, specifically those that revolve around clinical trials for medical drugs.

The most pertinent ethical focus-point of clinical trials involves the use of placebo measures. These measures are taken to account for a common confounding variable called the Placebo Effect, in which patients who believe they are receiving a helpful treatment experience a health benefit that is more due to mental state than the actual effects of a drug. It is critical for scientists to account for this phenomenon in order to accurately determine the beneficial and harmful capabilities of the developing medicines, however, the only way they can do this involves a very ethically-challenging practice of withholding information from patients.

Since the Placebo Effect is a direct result of patients believing that they are receiving a helpful treatment, it is necessary for researchers to administer a fake or placebo treatment to certain clinical trial participants in order to gauge whether or not any observed benefits of a drug go beyond the effects of the placebo phenomenon. Therefore, there is a huge ethical concern due to the fact that patients involved in a clinical trial may be receiving a useless treatment without their knowledge.

However, on the other hand, all clinical trial participants are made familiar with this practice and agreement to the potential of being chosen for a placebo group in a clinical trial. So while patients may never directly know that that they are in a control group, they agree to the possibility of such a thing happening. Furthermore, advocates of this practice point out the critical role placebo measures play in trials which allows scientists to develop more advanced, helpful drugs than ever before.

So do the benefits of placebo measures in clinical testing outweigh the ethical concerns? Interested to hear your thoughts below.

The Ethics of Collegiate Sports

Source: scarborough.com

With the Olympic Games currently taking place in Sochi, I thought it would be appropriate to examine a sports-related issue as the subject of this week’s ethical dilemma: collegiate athletics.

College sports are already a huge and rapidly expanding facet of American entertainment and media. NCAA leagues have become more popular than ever with millions of viewers tuning in to watch with nearly as much enthusiasm as the professional levels. Student athletes are feeling the full effect of this increasing attention, and as a result have provoked a very ethically challenging discussion: should student athletes be paid?

Due to the increased popularity of collegiate athletics, student-athletes are generating greater amounts of revenue than ever before. However, due to the rules of the system in which they play, no student athlete ever sees a penny of this revenue. Considering the long hours of practice, academic obligations, and high performance expectations of these young athletes, many argue that they deserve to benefit from the financial potential of their abilities. Especially in recent years, where college programs have raking in more revenue than ever before, it seems unethical that a student athlete could be paid nothing in comparison to a professional athlete making millions.

However, some argue that student-athletes are compensated in other ways for their work. For example, many student athletes receive lucrative scholarships to the universities that they play for. Furthermore, some argue that the logistics of paying student athletes would be impossible to deal with as well as intrinsically unfair. While some schools have very profitable athletic programs, many others don’t. In fact, some collegiate athletics programs, especially for less-popular sports, are losing money. In these cases, it would be impossible for the university to compensate athletes at all let alone to a comparable extent of the more profitable schools. Finally, the critical ethical component against paying students athletes lies in the nature of the universities. Some claim that since the purpose of universities is to educate students, paying student athletes would destroy what is already a compromised system of student-athlete recruitment and would sacrifice the educational benefit to athletes in the name of profit. Basically, it would be a very ethically-dubious decision.

As someone with my own athletic high-school experiences, I can certainly attest to the long hours of practice and high expectations that burden student athletes. I can only imagine the increased intensity of the burdens at a collegiate level, and therefore sympathize heavily with the student athletes. However, I also recognize the serious ethical and logistical issues that arise with the option of compensating these athletes monetarily. Hopefully, universities and their hard-working student-athletes will eventually be able to come to an ethical compromise which will provide a fairer outcome for the players.