A blog from the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)

Month: January 2019

Larger and smaller sized ethics

Pär SegerdahlEthics can be about big, almost religious questions. Should scientists be allowed to harvest stem cells from human embryos and then destroy the embryos? Ethics can also be about narrower, almost professional issues. How should the development of embryonic stem cell lines be regulated? The latter question is similar to the question: How should the aircraft industry be regulated?

Larger and smaller ethics can have difficulties understanding each other, even though they often need to talk. For example, larger ethics can be suspicious of medical research and the pharmaceutical industry, and overlook how meticulously responsible they most often are. And how rigorously supervised they are, as the aircraft industry. Neither the drug nor the aircraft industry can be carefree about safety issues!

Smaller ethics can also be suspicious of larger ethics. Medical research and industry, with their professional attitudes, can experience larger ethical questions as being as vague and distant as nebulae. This fact, that larger and smaller ethics have difficulties even hearing each other, creates the need for a simpler, more sincerely questioning attitude, which never settles within any limits, whether they are narrower or wider. Remember that even larger perspectives often degenerate into regulations of how people should think. They shrink.

Medical research and industry need regulation, it is as important as the safety work in the aircraft industry. However, we need also to think big about human life and life in general. In order to keep ethics alive, a beginner’s attitude is needed, constantly renewed sincerity. Does it sound difficult? All we need to do is to ask the questions we really wonder about, instead of hiding them behind a confident facade.

Nothing could be easier. The question is if we dare. The sincerest questions open up the biggest perspectives.

Pär Segerdahl

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Ask the patients about the benefits and the risks

Pär SegerdahlAlmost no medications are without risks of side effects. When new drugs are approved, decision makers must balance risks and benefits. To make the balancing, they use results from clinical trials where the drugs are tested on patients to determine (among other things) efficacy and side effects.

But how do you balance risks and benefits? Is the balancing completely objective, so that all that is needed is results from clinical trials? Or can risks and benefits be valued differently?

It has been noted that decision makers can value risks and benefits differently from patients. Therefore, results merely from clinical trials do not suffice. Decision makers also need to understand how the patients themselves value the risks and the benefits associated with treatments of their disease. The patients need to be asked about their preferences.

Karin Schölin Bywall is a PhD student at CRB. She plans to carry out preference studies with patients suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. The task is complex, since risks and benefits are multidimensional. Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic disease with several symptoms, such as pain, stiffness, fatigue, fever, weakness, deformity, malaise, weight loss and depression. Medications can be variously effective on different symptoms, while they can have a range of side effects. Which positive effect on which symptom is sufficiently important for the patients to outweigh a certain level of one of the side effects?

Many patients naturally want the drug to enable them to work, despite the disease. However, if the pain is relieved enough to enable carrying out the work, while the medicine has as a side effect such fatigue that the patient cannot get out of bed, then the desired benefit is not provided.

To prepare her preference study, Karin Schölin Bywall decided to approach the patient group immediately. From the very beginning, she wanted to engage the patients in her research, by interviewing them about how they perceive participating in preference studies on new drugs against rheumatoid arthritis.

The patients stated that they saw it as important to be involved in regulatory decisions about new treatments of their disease. So that decision makers understand the patients’ own experiences of the benefits and risks that such drugs may have, and what the benefits and risks mean in practice, in the daily life of a rheumatic.

Results from the interviews are reported in the journal, The Patient – Patient-Centered Outcomes Research. The article emphasizes that preference studies can lead to drugs that the patient group is more motivated to take according to the physician’s instructions, which can improve clinical outcomes in the patients. The patients further stated that as participants in preference studies they want good information about how the drug functions, about how the study will be used by decision makers, and about where in the decision-making process the study will be used.

Feedback from patients is likely to become increasingly important in future decisions on medical products.

Pär Segerdahl

Schölin Bywall, K.; Veldwijk, J.; Hansson, M. G.; Kihlbom, U. “Patient Perspectives on the Value of Patient Preference Information in Regulatory Decision Making: A Qualitative Study in Swedish Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis.” The Patient – Patient-Centered Outcomes Research, 2018. DOI: 10.1007/s40271-018-0344-2

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The human being is not only a category

Pär SegerdahlWe often use words as categories, as names of classes of things or individuals in the world. Humans and animals. Englishmen and Germans. Capitalists and Communists. Christians and Muslims. I want to highlight a difficulty we may encounter if we try to handle the problem of human violence from such an outward looking perspective.

Something that easily happens is that we start looking for the ideal subcategory of humans, whom we cannot accuse of any violence. If we only found a truly peaceful group of humans, somewhere in the world, we could generalize it to all humanity. We could create an evidence-based humanity, finally living peacefully. We could wipe out the problem of violence! However, where do we find the nonviolent humans who, on scientific grounds, could guide the rest of humanity to peace?

One problem here is that if we find some peaceful humans, perhaps on the British Isles, or in the Himalayas, then we must convert all other humans on the surface of this planet to the peaceful category. That does not sound promising! On the contrary, it sounds like a recipe for war.

Already the search for evidence seems violent, since it will repeat not just one, but all accusations of violence that ever were directed at groups of people. After all, there are:

  • violent Christians
  • violent Muslims
  • violent Capitalists
  • violent Anti-Capitalists
  • violent Germans
  • violent Englishmen

Moreover, there are violent trombonists. We also know that there are violent democrats, as well as violent anti-democrats. Lately we have been surprised to learn that even Buddhists can persecute humans and burn down temples and mosques. How about that! Even Buddhists are violent. The project to create an evidence-based, peaceful humanity seems hopeless.

However, let us turn this around. After all, we are all humans:

  • Christians are humans
  • Muslims are humans
  • Capitalists are humans
  • Anti-Capitalists are humans
  • Germans are humans
  • Englishmen are humans

Trombonists are humans, as are democrats, anti-democrats and Buddhists. We are all humans. Does it not sound hopeful when we acknowledge the fact that we are all humans? It certainly does sound full of promise. But why?

Is it perhaps because we stop opposing humans and instead speak more grandiosely about the human as one big universal category? I do not think so. After all, the problem was, from the beginning, that there are:

  • violent humans

It is not difficult to distrust the human as a universal category. Would it not be best if the human simply disappeared from this overburdened planet? Is it not horrible that we are all these humans, intruding on nature? In fact, there are those who propose that we should transgress the human category and become post-human. As though the solution were an unborn category.

No, the hope we felt emerged, I think, precisely because we stopped talking about human beings as a category. Notice the word we humans. What does it mean to talk about us humans? I think it means that we no longer speak of the human as a category in the world, not even grandiosely as a universal category. Rather, the human is, more intimately, “all of us,” “you and me,” “each one of us.”

When we talk about the human from within, we do not accuse the human as a worldly category to be violent. Rather, we see the violence in ourselves. I see it in me; you see it in you. We see the violence in each one of us; we see it in all of us. The responsibility thereby naturally becomes our own human responsibility. That is where the hope we felt emanated, I believe. It came from the internal perspective on the human. This nearness to ourselves made acknowledging that we are all humans sound full of promise.

I stop here. I just wanted to remind you of the fact that the human being is not only a worldly category with which to calculate and experiment. The category of the human can make us blind to ourselves as intimately alive, and thereby to the violence in us and to our responsibility for it.

I just hope this reminder did not trigger further violence: “What!? Are you suggesting that the problem lies in me? How impudent! Please, don’t include me in your pathetic we.”

Pär Segerdahl

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