Furious Seasons

October 23, 2005

Clinical Trials Using Placebo are Unethical

As I just pointed out, short-term (ie, 8 week) studies of meds are little more than suggestive and, in my opinion, are weak predictors of how patients respond to meds in a real world manner. That's not all that bothers me about these trials.

I also object to trialing drugs against placebo in mentally-ill patients. It is unethical to treat very sick people with the equivalent of water, and cannot be of any benefit to the patient in the short term. It may harm them. Last time I checked, doctors still took an oath to do no harm.

And yet the human subjects committees at major research institutions still approve the use of placebo.

More than a decade ago, AIDS activists challenged--very aggressively so--both pharma companies and federal regulators to stop trialing AIDS/HIV meds against placebo because the patients in the test groups had really shitty t-cell counts--and to give a dwindling patient nothing was unethical, inhumane, and immoral.

It's the same deal for us. If the reseachers, etc. will not do the decent thing and stop using placebo, then we must demand it of them.

Posted by Philip Dawdy at October 23, 2005 04:02 AM

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Comments

That's one of the most interesting points I've ever heard: It's unethical experitment on sick people due to placeobs. VERY interesting.

The only thing is, how else are you to do research on drugs if you're not able conduct those type of expiriements??? I've really been thinking about this, and it doesn't seem like there is any easy solution.

You could always expiriement on rats, but that will probably turn out to be fruitless, like you've pointed out in other posts...

The only other thing I could think of is to expiriment on people who are so sick, due to something like AIDS, and are near death no matter what you do -- then those people you could do the placebo thing. But that sounds just as unethical as the first scenirio if not more...

And in terms of something like bipolar where death is out of the question... then that really blows my mind.

Anyway, maybe in my total ignorance, I'm missing something really obvious...

And the only other thing I can think of, is these people are AGREEING to this expiriement. They're going along with this. So, if you sign a contract or whatever to participate in a study, even though you are completely aware that you may only have a 50% chance of recovering...then maybe it's fine.

But still, that point you brought up is down right irksome. Thinking of scientific research -- the only scientifc research we have -- as inhumane and unethical, is scary. Yuck, I don't want to think about it anymore.

Posted by: Gwen Davis at October 23, 2005 12:20 PM