Franklin G. Miller

Robert D. Truog

Withdrawing life-sustaining treatment: allowing to die or causing death? -- Active euthanasia -- Death and the brain -- Challenges to a circulatory-respiratory criterion for death -- Donation after circulatory determination of death -- Vital organ donation without the dead donor rule -- Legal fictions approach to organ donation.

Reconstructing Medical Ethics at the End of Life

Death, Dying, and Organ Transplantation

Ezekiel J. Emanuel

Christine C. Grady

Robert A. Crouch

Reidar K. Lie

David D. Wendler

The Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics is the first comprehensive and systematic reference on clinical research ethics. Under the editorship of experts from the U.S. National Institutes of Health of the United States, the book's 73 chapters offer a wide-ranging and systematic examination of all aspects of research with human beings. Considering the historical triumphs of research as well as its tragedies, the textbook provides a framework for analyzing the ethical aspects of research studies with human beings. Through both conceptual analysis and systematic reviews of empirical data, the contributors examine issues ranging from scientific validity, fair subject selection, risk benefit ratio, independent review, and informed consent to focused consideration of international research ethics, conflicts of interests, and other aspects of responsible conduct of research. The editors of The Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics offer a work that critically assesses and advances scholarship in the field of human subjects research. Comprehensive in scope and depth, this book will be a crucial resource for researchers in the medical sciences, as well as teachers and students.

The Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics

Luana Colloca

The defining circumstances and reasons for promoting healing processes based on placebo and avoiding (undesirable) nocebo effects in clinical practice represent a challenge for translational and patient-oriented medicine. Exploiting placebos and placebo effects for the benefit of the patient requires a rigorous evaluation of potential benefits and harms associated with these interventions. Moreover, any attempts to harness placebo benefits and mitigate nocebo effects in clinical practice should be done consistently with professional norms and integrity, and ethical-legal requirements of informed consent. This chapter systematically discusses the complex issue of professional and ethical requirements in using placebos and placebo effects in pain-related research and practices. Within this scope, some important questions need to be addressed as well: (a) Can placebo analgesic effects produce clinically significant benefits? (b) What translational research is being done, or should be done? (c) What work is being done in this area to enable and encourage doctors to incorporate ethically the concept of placebo and nocebo effects into their work?

Chapter 27. Placebo and Nocebo: Ethical Challenges and Solutions

Placebo and Pain

Ted J. Kaptchuk

The placebo effect is a fascinating but elusive phenomena. Although no standard definition of the placebo effect exists, it is generally understood as consisting of responses of individuals to the psychosocial context of medical treatments or clinical encounters, as distinct from specific physiological effects of medical interventions. The Placebo is the first book to compile a selection of classic and contemporary published articles on the topic. Systematic investigation of the placebo effect emerged in the 1950s in response to the development of randomized controlled clinical trials that used “inert” placebo interventions as a pivotal element of scientific evaluation of novel drugs. In recent years, scientific and scholarly investigation of the placebo effect has increased dramatically, reflecting a growing interest in the connection between mind and body with respect to health, the development of brain imaging techniques, dissatisfaction with the reductionist and technological orientation of biomedicine, and growing attention to the use of complementary and alternative medical treatments. The Placebo is organized into three sections: the nature and significance of the placebo effect, experimental studies of the placebo effect, and ethical issues of placebos in research and in clinical practice. This comprehensive sourcebook will be invaluable to investigators and scholars alike.

A Reader

The Placebo

Franklin G. Miller

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