Placebo treatments, informed consent and 'the grip of a false picture'

Physician perspectives on placebo ethics

Clinical use of placebos is controversial among bioethicists. While placebos have been shown to provide benefit for patients with some conditions, offering placebos to patients without disclosing that they are placebos raises ethical concerns, including the concern that this lack of transparency about the nature of placebos amounts to deceiving patients. Some have proposed open-label placebos (OLPs) as an ethically preferable alternative: patients are offered placebos and told that the treatment being offered is a placebo. To contribute to the ongoing discussion about the ethics and feasibility of clinical use of placebos, we conducted focus groups to explore physician attitudes about clinical use of placebos, including non-disclosed and OLPs, and physician attitudes about the underlying ethical issues. We found that while the non-transparency and deceptiveness of offering non-disclosed placebos was a concern for some physicians, their primary focus when considering both non-disclosed and OLPs was identifying and weighing potential harms and benefits to patients. Some participants also felt further research and training in prescribing OLPs would be needed before they would be willing to use them in their practice.

Ethics of placebo use in clinical practice: why we need to look beyond deontology

Beneficent clinical usage of placebos has been a problem for the application of Kant's deontology in medical ethics, which, in its strictest form, rejects deception universally. Some defenders of deontology have countered this by arguing placebos can be used by a physician without necessarily being deceptive. In this paper we argue that such a manipulation of Kant's absolutism is not credible, and therefore, that we should look beyond deontology in our consideration of placebo usage in clinical practice. We conclude that Kant's deontology cannot be made compatible with placebo use in clinical practice due to the primacy it affords to the principle of autonomy.

Psychotherapy, placebos, and informed consent

Several authors have recently argued that psychotherapy, as it is commonly practiced, is deceptive and undermines patients' ability to give informed consent to treatment. This 'deception' claim is based on the findings that some, and possibly most, of the ameliorative effects in psychotherapeutic interventions are mediated by therapeutic common factors shared by successful treatments (eg, expectancy effects and therapist effects), rather than because of theory-specific techniques. These findings have led to claims that psychotherapy is, at least partly, likely a placebo, and that practitioners of psychotherapy have a duty to 'go open' to patients about the role of common factors in therapy (even if this risks negatively affecting the efficacy of treatment); to not 'go open' is supposed to unjustly restrict patients' autonomy. This paper makes two related arguments against the 'go open' claim. (1) While therapies ought to provide patients with sufficient information to make informed treatment decisions, informed consent does not require that practitioners 'go open' about therapeutic common factors in psychotherapy, and (2) clarity about the mechanisms of change in psychotherapy shows us that the common-factors findings are consistent with, rather than undermining of, the truth of many theory-specific forms of psychotherapy; psychotherapy, as it is commonly practiced, is not deceptive and is not a placebo. The call to 'go open' should be resisted and may have serious detrimental effects on patients via the dissemination of a false view about how therapy works.

Lay People's Ethical Attitudes To Placebo Treatment: A Q-Methodology Study

BACKGROUND

Placebo-treatment acceptability is debated among ethicists, mostly due to conflict between respect-to-autonomy and beneficence principles. It is not clear how lay people balance these and other ethical principles.

METHODS

One hundred and eighty-seven respondents rank-ordered 42 opinion statements covering various ethical aspects of placebo-treatment, according to a 9-category symmetrical distribution. We analyzed statements' scores using averaging-analysis and by-person factor analysis (Q-methodology).

RESULTS

Respondents' mean (SD) age was 34.6 (10.6) years, 54% were women, 40% healthcare-related, 68% Muslims (31% Christians), and 39% received general education in Saudi Arabia (24% in the Philippines). On averaging-analysis, the most-agreeable statements were "Acceptable if benefit to patient large" and "Acceptable with physician intent to benefit patient". The most-disagreeable statements were "Acceptable with physician self-benefit intent" and "Acceptable with large harm to other patients". Muslims gave a higher rank to "Giving no description is acceptable", "Acceptable with small benefit to patient", and "Acceptable with physician intent to benefit patient" and a lower rank to "Acceptable to describe as inactive drug", "Acceptable with physician intent to please patient caring relative", and "Acceptable with moderate harm to other patients" (p<0.01). Q-methodology detected several ethical attitude models that were mostly multi-principled and consequentialism-dominated. The majority of Christian and Philippines-educated women loaded on a "relatively family and deception-concerned" model, whereas the majority of Muslim and Saudi Arabia-educated women loaded on a "relatively common-good-concerned" model. The majority of Christian and healthcare men loaded on a "relatively deception-concerned" model, whereas the majority of Muslim and non-healthcare men loaded on a "relatively motives-concerned" model. Of nine intent-related statements, ≥2 received extreme rank on averaging-analysis and in 100% of women and men models.

CONCLUSION

1) On averaging-analysis, patient's beneficence (consequentialism) followed by physician's intent (virtue ethics) were more important than deception (respect-to-autonomy). 2) Q-methodology identified several ethical attitude models that were mostly multi-principled and associated with respondents' demographics.

Parsing placebo treatments: a response to Barnhill and Miller

Anne Barnhill and Franklin Miller dispute my claim that the prescriptions of placebo treatments to patients are not typically deceptive, and do not typically violate the patients' informed consent. However, Barnhill and Miller seriously mischaracterise my position in two ways, as well as failing to show that the procedure I discuss requires a physician to act wrongfully in deceiving her patient. Accordingly, I find their argument unpersuasive.

[Informed consent process in clinical trials: Insights of researchers, patients and general practitioners]

OBJECTIVE

Adequate information for patients and respect for their autonomy are mandatory in research. This article examined insights of researchers, patients and general practitioners (GPs) on the informed consent process in clinical trials, and the role of the GP.

DESIGN

A cross-sectional study using three questionnaires, informed consent reviews, medical records, and hospital discharge reports.

SETTING

GPs, researchers and patients involved in clinical trials.

PARTICIPANTS

Included, 504 GPs, 108 researchers, and 71 patients.

RESULTS

Consulting the GP was recommended in 50% of the informed consents. Participation in clinical trials was shown in 33% of the medical records and 3% of the hospital discharge reports. GPs scored 3.54 points (on a 1-10 scale) on the assessment of the information received by the principal investigator. The readability of the informed consent sheet was rated 8.03 points by researchers, and the understanding was rated 7.68 points by patients. Patient satisfaction was positively associated with more time for reflection.

CONCLUSIONS

GPs were not satisfied with the information received on the participation of patients under their in clinical trials. Researchers were satisfied with the information they offered to patients, and were aware of the need to improve the information GPs received. Patients collaborated greatly towards biomedical research, expressed satisfaction with the overall process, and minimised the difficulties associated with participation.

The ethics of placebo treatments in clinical practice: a reply to Glackin

In 'Placebo treatments, informed consent, and "the grip of a false picture"' Shane Nicholas Glackin argues that if a physician offers a patient an inert placebo with the following disclosure, this is compatible with informed consent and is not deceptive: 'I would like to offer you a pill which I believe can help lessen your suffering. I do not know exactly how it works. I have other pills to offer whose mechanism is clearer, but I am not sure that they will work better for you, and they may also entail more serious side effects'. According to Glackin, telling patients that the recommended treatment is an inert placebo is providing incidental information, analogous to telling a patient the chemical details of an active drug. He argues that this information would influence a patient's decision only if she was 'in the grip of a false picture' that inert drugs do not have physical effects on patients' bodies. We contend that this disclosure typically is incompatible with informed consent and typically is deceptive. We give an example of a transparent placebo disclosure, that is, a disclosure that is compatible with informed consent and is not deceptive.