Reply to: Letter to the Editor by M. Olsen, M. K. Sharp, and P. M. Bossuyt

On behalf of our coauthors, we thank Olsen, Sharp, and Bossuyt for their insightful comments [1]. We agree that a major challenge to ensuring that proposed randomized clinical trials are ethically justified is developing a system to evaluate their ethics in practical terms. One of the great weaknesses of the concept of equipoise is that no widely accepted operationalization has been developed, despite its widespread use for 30  years. In the absence of such a system, an ethical principle may be used unethically, that is, unfairly and in a biased manner.
Source: Journal of Clinical Epidemiology - Category: Epidemiology Authors: Tags: Letter to the Editor Source Type: research