Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14456
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: Journal Article
Fisher JA.
Practicing research ethics: private-sector physicians & pharmaceutical clinical trials.
Soc Sci Med. 2008 Jun; 66:(12):2495-505
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VBF-4S32DMX-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=daa3fac02b01d35003e7e08c96c44616
Abstract:
This paper focuses on constructions of research ethics by primary care physicians in the USA as they engage in contract research for the pharmaceutical industry. Drawing first on historical studies of physicians as investigators and then on 12 months of qualitative fieldwork in the Southwestern US, this paper analyzes the shifting, contextualized ethics that shape physicians’ relationships with patients/subjects and pharmaceutical companies. Just as physicians followed professional codes of ethics prior to the codification of acceptable research conduct in the 1980s, physicians today continue to develop tacit systems of research ethics. This paper argues that private-sector physicians primarily conceptualize their ethical conduct in relation to the pharmaceutical companies hiring them, not to human subjects they enroll in clinical trials. This is not to say that these physicians do not follow the formal U.S. regulation to protect human subjects, but rather that their financial relationships with the pharmaceutical industry have a greater influence on their identities as researchers and on their constructions of their ethical responsibilities.
Keywords:
Clinical Protocols
Clinical Trials as Topic*/economics
Clinical Trials as Topic*/ethics
Contract Services/ethics*
Drug Industry
Ethics, Research*
Humans
Interprofessional Relations*
Physician-Patient Relations/ethics
Physicians/ethics*
Primary Health Care
Private Sector
United States
