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by tialaramex
2922 days ago
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Yup. Doctors interested in the philosophy of science have moaned about this sort of thing before. A more typical example goes like this: I'm a GP, and I see dozens of patients every year with cases of Foozle disease. I was taught in medical school to give them orange pills, but I follow developments in general medicine and I know the new purple pill has seen good results for Foozle too. Nobody has published even a small study about which is better. The law says since a responsible doctor wouldn't know one is better I can choose either. I could give all my female Foozle patients the orange pills and prescribe the purple for everybody else, or I could just pick whichever is cheapest, or I could even pick randomly for each patient. All legal. But, if I pick randomly AND record the results, thus doing science to find out which was best, that's an unauthorised medical experiment and I could lose my job or even go to jail. |
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Perhaps we can try to cut down the red tape a little but we can't eliminate the idea of informed consent. If you're doing a study on patients, they absolutely have a right to know and a right to refuse to be a part of your study without any repercussions.
I think informed consent is something we can't get rid of even if we do something drastic and eliminate medical licensing altogether.