The ethical challenges of human research
Subtitle: selected essays
By: Franklin G. Miller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Oxford
Language: eng
Number of pages: 322
ISBN-13: 9780199896202
Subjects: Collected Works; Human Experimentation; Clinical Trials as Topic; Ethics; Placebos
Description: The use of human beings as research subjects poses distinctive ethical issues. Subjects of medical research are exposed to risks of harm for the sake of generating scientific knowledge that can benefit future patients and society. Ethical analysis of the challenges posed by research involving human subjects requires careful attention to the contextual details of scientific experimentation. This book contains 22 essays by Franklin G. Miller on research ethics written over a 15-year period. With the exception of the first essay, all have been previously published in bioethics and medical journals. The book is arranged into four parts. Part One addresses a general ethical perspective on the protection of human subjects in clinical research, including paternalism in research regulation and acceptable limits to research risks. The essays in Part Two examine ethical issues in study design. It includes ethical analyses of controversial types of medical experimentation-studies that provoke psychiatric symptoms, induce infections, provide patients with placebos that withhold proven effective treatments or administer fake invasive procedures, test experimental treatments in cancer patients who have exhausted all standard treatment options, and employ the use of deception to generate scientifically valid data. Part Three offers a systematic critique of "the therapeutic orientation" to clinical trials and the principle of clinical equipoise, which is widely regarded as a fundamental norm for randomized treatment studies. Part Four takes up a range of ethical issues relating to informed consent for research participation, including examination of "the therapeutic misconception" and presentation of a novel approach to the validity of consent: "the fair transaction model." An abiding theme, developed in many of the essays is that the ethics of clinical research is importantly different from the ethics of medical care.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Situating research ethics : revisiting Beecher and Jonas; title: Facing up to paternalism in research ethics; title: Limits to research risks; title: Psychiatric symptom-provoking studies : an ethical appraisal; title: The ethical challenge of infection-inducing challenge experiments; title: Placebo-controlled trials in psychiatric research : an ethical perspective; title: What makes placebo-controlled trials unethical?; title: Ethical issues concerning research on complementary and alternative medicine; title: Sham surgery : an ethical analysis; title: Deception in research on the placebo effect; title: Debriefing and accountability in deceptive research; title: Professional integrity in clinical researc; title: The therapeutic orientation to clinical trial; title: A critique of clinical equipoise : therapeutic misconception in the ethics of clinical trials; title: Clinical equipoise and the incoherence of research ethics; title: Equipoise and the randomized clinical trial dilemma; title: Evaluating the therapeutic misconception; title: Is it ethical to keep interim findings of randomized controlled trials confidential?; title: Research on medical records without informed consent; title: Coverage with evidence development : ethical issues and policy implications; title: The fair transaction model of informed consent : an alternative to autonomous authorization.