Ethical Issues Concerning Research in Complementary and Alternative Medicine

The use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has grown dramatically in recent years, as has research on the safety and efficacy of CAM treatments. Minimal attention, however, has been devoted to the ethical issues relating to research on CAM. We argue that public health and safety demand...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association 2004-02, Vol.291 (5), p.599-604
Main Authors: Miller, Franklin G, Emanuel, Ezekiel J, Rosenstein, Donald L, Straus, Stephen E
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Alternative medicine
Bioethics
Biological and medical sciences
Biomedical Research - ethics
Clinical trials
Clinical Trials as Topic - ethics
Complementary Therapies - ethics
Drug therapy
Ethics
Health participants
Humans
Medical sciences
Placebo effect
Placebos
Public health. Hygiene
Public health. Hygiene-occupational medicine
Public safety
Reproducibility of Results
Risk Assessment
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has grown dramatically in recent years, as has research on the safety and efficacy of CAM treatments. Minimal attention, however, has been devoted to the ethical issues relating to research on CAM. We argue that public health and safety demand rigorous research evaluating CAM therapies, research on CAM should adhere to the same ethical requirements for all clinical research, and randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials should be used for assessing the efficacy of CAM treatments whenever feasible and ethically justifiable. In addition, we explore the legitimacy of providing CAM and conventional therapies that have been demonstrated to be effective only by virtue of the placebo effect.
ISSN:0098-7484
1538-3598
DOI:10.1001/jama.291.5.599