Activities that we may want to keep apart often overlap. An example is cancer research and care. Clinical cancer centers often conduct research and recruit patients as research participants. Such research is important if we want to offer future patients better cancer treatments. However, does this also apply to patients participating in studies? Are they offered better care as research participants?
Together with five co-authors, Tove Godskesen recently published an interview study with clinical physicians carrying out clinical cancer trials in Sweden, Denmark and Finland. The questions were about what ethical challenges the physicians perceived in the care of patients who participate in clinical trials. Does the overlap of care and research create ethical challenges? Although several physicians mentioned challenges, there were tendencies to downplay ethical difficulties and to associate the overlap between research and care with care benefit.
Tove Godskesen sees indications of a culture of hope in clinical cancer trials, where patients and physicians reinforce the image of research participation as an opportunity to access the latest therapy. However, uncertain patients can challenge the picture by asking the physician to affirm that the experimental treatment is as good as the standard treatment. You do not know that. That is why you are doing research!
The authors do not make any claims about whether a culture of hope in clinical cancer trials is good or not. However, they believe that the culture needs to become visible and discussed openly. So that the ethical challenges when care and research overlap do not disappear from sight.
The culture of hope has several aspects that you can read more about in the article. For example, the attitude that it is better to avoid giving patients bad news.
Written by…
Pär Segerdahl, Associate Professor at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics and editor of the Ethics Blog.
Tove E Godskesen, Suzanne Petri, Stefan Eriksson, Arja Halkoaho, Margrete Mangset and Zandra E Nielsen. The culture of hope and ethical challenges in clinical trials: A qualitative study of oncologists and haematologists’ views. Clinical Ethics. First Published December 30, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1177/1477750919897379
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