Project 3 Post 1

 The ethical dilemma that I will be focusing on is medical ethics in clinical trials, specifically medical equipoise. Medical equipoise is the idea that the clinicians who conduct clinical trials should genuinely posses no knowledge of which participants receive the experimental therapy and which receive a placebo. The issue that can occur, however, is that patients may either be harmed by the drug itself or by the placebo. In addition, patients in the placebo arm of the study may be prevented from receiving a potentially effective treatment. This puts in conflict the values of beneficence and non-maleficence with autonomy. Patients may decide to take on higher risk, so placing them into a placebo group without their knowledge would be against autonomy. In addition, beneficence toward future patients by proving the safety and efficacy of a drug comes into conflict with non-maleficence toward present patients. A possible course of action to solve this issue is crossover trials in which patients receive both the placebo and the active drug at different times based on their current state of recovery. However, this may not produce as much data as a normal trial would.