Ethical Issues In Oncology Patients

There are some trials that are being worked on around the world right now. For example, in 2013 a trial of an experimental treatment for advanced malignant melanoma took place in London at the Royal Marsden Hospital. One of the patients received three intravenous infusions, and after the second one the lumps that had been in her throat and breast had vanished. While those results were extraordinary, it is by far not the only time to have happened. There have been many similar trials that had the same results as this one. These new anticancer drugs are being called cancer inhibitors and some scientists are saying it could be the “turning point in cancer treatment.” Instead of

There are several disease that are we still do not know much about despite copious amounts of research. Cancer and Alzheimer’s are two major examples of these mysterious diseases. Although the scientific method is useful in the development and research on various medications and treatments, there are still limitations. Patients react to treatments in various ways, because bodies and systems vary from person to person. There is simply too many variable to be able to pinpoint the exact reaction a patient may have. Clinical trials and studies can narrow down these reactions down to a list of possible side effects, but doctors can never know for sure how a patient will respond. There are many unknowns and treating actual patients is much different that conducting an experiment investigating how two medications will effect an experimental unit. During a designed experiment, the experimenter can control all the variables except for the experimental variable and get clear straightforward results. On the other hand, when treating a real patient with a severe illness, such as cancer, the physician has to keep an eye on all body systems. They cannot simple give all of their attention to the area of the body that is currently affected. In these practical settings, there is simply too many variables for the scientific method to be as useful as it normally

According to the U.S Department of Health and Human Services, the Affordable care Act from President Obama gives consumers more options and benefits when seeking coverage from insurance company. It offers lowering cost as well as gets more access to high quality of care. This law creates Patient’s Bill of Rights that is very effective to protect consumers from any abuses or fraud from insurance company. Some preventive services are available to many Americans especially Medicare recipients at no cost. Not just that, they also receive a special offer of 50 percent discount for any well-known drugs in the market place under Medicare named “donut hole.” The Affordable Care Act helps other organizations and programs to convince healthcare providers

Misconception with equipoise will make the barrier between therapeutic and research null. Its goal in producing reliable and generalizable knowledge is coiled in with ethical difficulty. That’s why on an ethical standpoint, benefiting a collective group needs to be weighed with the rights of the participant patients in the clinical research. However, the goal of equipoise is beneficial since its main priority is extracting epistemic information from the randomized clinical trials. The useful information is needed since equipoise follows the principle of having “a state of genuine uncertainty.” This affects both theoretical and clinical. So, trials that are redundant can be marked out by taking equipoise into account since the trials have already been run where there is already certainty of the outcome. So, to detail what equipoise allows underneath the principle of “non-exploitation” is that there will be no exploitation of participants or patients with a needless trial that holds no useful outcome. Equipoise becomes a necessary condition in order for a trial to become ethical since trials must be reviewed to be deemed of value. But, there’s an underlying factor that equipoise’s uncertainty trials do not bring about and that is the health of the patients. Participant patients will undergo trials of uncertainty so there is a possibility that the patient may be harmed during the process. If the trial proceeds, then the health of the patients will be even more at risk, disregarded and exploited in order to grasp epistemic information. The moral principles between medical therapy and those that guide clinical research is different. Though, equipoise is valuable in a collective sense – it is exploitative of participant patients by failing to consider the balance with the subject and societal

In the field of medicine, clinical trials are known to be a reliable source of information. Although ethical issues do arise, to which the theory of equipoise was proposed, which states that there should be a balance of forces of interests (Weijer et al., 95). There are two types of equipoise; clinical and theoretical. Clinical equipoise is the assignment of multiple treatments to be tested on patients with the disagreement in the medical community in which medical professionals have differing views that one treatment is better than the others (Weijer et al., pg. 97). Theoretical equipoise is between a physician and researcher and the belief that the risks and benefits of the treatments are in perfect balance (Wiejer et al., 96). The differing factor of the two, being that clinical equipoise focuses on the difference in views of certain treatments involving much of the medical community to form an insightful conclusion on the procedure to which the evidence supporting each treatment does not have to be balanced, whereas theoretical equipoise focuses on the equal amount of risks and benefits within each treatment (Weijer et al., 97). With that being said I personally believe researchers must be in a state of clinical equipoise to run morally acceptable clinical trials.

Proponents of placebo-prescribing argue that clinicians “can use non-deceptive means to promote a positive placebo response in their patients” (Brody, 1982, 112). However, some proponents also argue that

Placebos have been used in clinical trials since the eighteenth century but did not become a research topic until the late twentieth century (van Haselen, 2013). Most often when using placebos in clinical trials it is to determine whether or not the active agent has more effect on a patient than the placebo by providing each to the same number of recipients. The trials are almost always double blinded, this means that both person giving the drug and the person receiving it are unaware whether or not it is active so that good care and relationships must be present in the recipients at all times (Tavel, 2014). Ovosi, Ibrahim, & Bello-Ovosi (2017) declared “The choice between placebo and active controls in clinical trials affects the quality of the result as well as the ethical and scientific acceptability by both the public and regulatory bodies. It has, therefore, continued to generate discuss among researchers” (para. 3). This goes against the autonomy of a patient which is the right for a person to

Abortion is one of the most polarising moral issues in today’s society. It presents an ethical dilemma for many people and especially all healthcare professionals involved. Firstly, this essay will begin by briefly outlining the highly controversial issue of abortion, discuss why this topic draws fierce debate, for and against, and explain the current legal standing in the UK today. It will then move on to explain how different ethical models can be used in relation to ethical dilemmas, in particular Thiroux’s Five Principles of Ethic’s. Using this model to discuss how each principle individually applies to this contested issue it will then conclude by summarising and highlighting the main conflicts

Imagine going to the doctor and being given medication to heal your pain. Now how would you feel if after taking the medication and feeling better you came to find out you were given a placebo? This may sound upsetting to some, however, “ a recent survey of U.S. internists and rheumatologists found that some 50% regular prescribe placebos.” A placebo is defined as a false treatment without any significant chemical properties or active ingredient. The use of placebos as a primary form of treatment with any pathology is not happening anytime soon, but their positive impact and usefulness in the medical field is becoming hard to deny. In the article, “The Magic of the Placebo”, author David Bjerklie attempts to explain the growing change in

In this paper I will defend ethics and palliative care as they pertain to end of life treatment of terminally ill patients. Aggressive medical administration of the terminally ill patient has created critical issues in the morals of end of life consideration. In summary, I will defend this hypothesis by arguing that the following principles, autonomy, beneficence, and justice must all be taken into consideration when treating a terminally ill patient.

The author believes that biomedical research is the way of better understanding medicine and without randomized clinical trials the field of medicine will have insufficient information. He argues that randomized clinical trials are the most scientifically sound and ethically correct means of evaluating new therapies. The belief of a physician being unethical when running randomized clinical trials is rejected by this article because previous trials on patients can have a better outcome on future patients. This article stresses that randomized clinical trials must be carefully designed that has an intended purpose of gathering data to improve the wellbeing of patients. If the patient is to endure a clinical trial he/she must be properly informed of the risks of the trial and the health of the patient should be high priority. Overall this article explains the importance of randomized clinical trials and debunks the idea of randomized clinical trials as being unethical. This article uses a utilitarian point of view and gives reasons why these trials can be in the best interests for both the patient and society.

The trial I chose to explore for this discussion is the Risperidone Trials that occurred in India. For this trial, psychiatric patients were lied to by being told that their specific anti-psychotic drugs were no longer available, and then were given a drug called risperidone or just a placebo (SOMO Briefing Paper, 2008). This was unethical because the patients were lied to and informed consent was not obtained from the individuals who participated in this clinical trial. All of the participants receiving the placebo were unaware that they were not being provided legitimate anti-psychotic medications. Providing placebos instead of medications to these individuals was a dangerous decision, especially since these individuals depended on these drugs in order to maintain a semblance of sanity. An ethical principle that this violates is known as beneficence, which is the idea that if we can, we ought to do good (or what is right) in any given

To start out, it is important to differentiate between practice and research, especially in this discussion of therapeutic research trials. Practice is meant to treat an individual in order to improve upon their quality of life. The practice of medicine generally yields good outcomes and is not inherently risky, with some exceptions. However, research on the other hand includes subjects or participants to learn something about people or a topic as a whole. While it seems that the differences are clear, there are many times when the lines between the two may blur. One of the ways that the differences are more ambiguous is in the case of

Why focus on treatment instead of finding a cure? It is simple; there is in profit in finding a cure for cancer. Desperate and eager to live, the typical cancer patient spends about $50,000 fighting the disease. Chemotherapy drugs are among the most expensive of all treatments, many ranging from $3,000 to $7,000 for a one-month supply. If the cancer industry allows a cure, then their patient base goes away (Dr. Mercola, D. (2011, January 1). Cancer: Forbidden Cures | Natural Cancer Treatment. Retrieved February 26, 2015, from http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/08/03/natural-cancer-treatment.aspx.) It makes more

Cancer. We all know someone who has suffered from it or has passed away because of it. Cancer now affects one in every three people, and is the second highest cause of death in the United States. For decades, the medical community has been on the hunt for a cure for cancer, and have been subjected to intense ridicule from the public because of a lack of progression toward a possible cure. In recent years, many scientists, doctors, researchers, and the general public have come to believe that the cure for cancer is being suppressed because of this lack of progress. Those who say it is suppressed claim that the drugs used to treat cancer actually cause cancer, making a patient sicker and sicker. As a result, the patients are forced to spend