Published in:
01-03-2005 | Clinical Commentary
Will ethical requirements bring critical care research to a halt?
Author:
Robert D. Truog
Published in:
Intensive Care Medicine
|
Issue 3/2005
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Excerpt
If current trends continue, within several years it could become nearly impossible to conduct research in critical care medicine. These trends have evolved in parallel in both North America and Europe. In North America, the catalyst for controversy has been the ARDSNet trials [
1,
2]. In Europe, the focus has been on European Directive 2001/20/EC [
3]. Although these developments differ in their details, they essentially reflect the public’s mistrust of clinicians and investigators involved in clinical research. This is a sad paradox, because critical care medicine consumes a large proportion of societal resources—more than 1% of the gross domestic product in the United States [
4]—such that development of improved and more cost-effective interventions is in everyone’s best interests. …