Patients Need to Know - Essay Example

I found this to be a very interesting article. It was topical. I was especially interested in what Dr. Corrigan wrote in relation to pharmaceutical trials and companies. These days there is a lot of controversy over the political, medical, and cultural influence of pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical companies. Because this is now big business, people are concerned that certain ethical standards may be being replaced by a nasty business sense. There have been some accusations of influence on doctors and other health professionals through drug representatives and salespeople, including the giving of gifts to doctors, paying for and sponsoring conferences, for example.

Doctors are often hired and paid to sit on the boards of various pharmaceutical companies thus providing an appearance of medical credibility to a company or product that may not independently possess it. The pharmaceutical industry also has thousands of lobbyists in Washington, D.C., that lobby Congress and try to protect their own interests and weaken laws that might limit their profit or make it more expensive and difficult to sell drugs. We need doctors to stand up and be ethical and to inform their patients about their involvement. Dr. Corrigan writes that when doctors request that patients participate in studies of a research nature, patients can feel manipulated or betrayed (781).

This is a very negative consequence with ethical implications that must be considered from both the point of view of the patient and of the doctor. This is a good example of the fine line that doctors walk in terms of ethics. Doctors need to take a careful look at how they may have been influenced by drug companies before they make recommendations and seek informed consent for participation in trials. The truth is that it is not “informed” consent if there is some information being held back from the patients.

One criticism of this paper is that there is really nothing new here. No real conclusion or method or idea is original. There have always been ethical concerns relating to informed consent and there probably always will be. The best conclusion of this paper is the following: patients need to know.