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.