Placebos In Medical Practice

Among medical researchers as well as clinicians, the prevailing opinion is that it is unethical to mislead patients by prescribing a placebo. This belief has been sanctioned by a recent policy published by the American Medical Association. Although placebos can be shown to be always harmless, and frequently effective, physicians are now prohibited from administering them in medical practice. In the article “A Duty to Deceive: Placebos in Clinical Practice” by Bennett Foddy, he argues that the deceptive administration of placebos is not subject to the same moral objections that face other forms of deception in clinical practice and medical research. Although deception is normally objectionable on the grounds that it limits autonomy and breaches …show more content…
He deceives the patient and tells them that the placebo is the cure to their problem. He then asks himself, "What is the principle of my action?" Suppose the answer is "Deceive as a means to an end." Since the answer was deception, the principle upon which he acted would become a universal law of nature, and everyone would deceive as a means to an end. If everyone was deceitful, even if for the greater good, trusting relationships might become impossible, because good faith would be lost. Thus, the maxim, deceive as a means to an end, is a contradiction in conception; the deception then, would never be believed in a world in which the maxim of this action was a universal law of nature. If a world exists in which everyone deceives when they feel it’s necessary, the physician might not be so willing to be deceptive on this occasion if the result was to become a universal law. Also, the physician might not want others to deceive him when they thought that it was …show more content…
Kingdom means the “union of different rational beings in a system by common laws”. To be part of this kingdom of rational beings, one must choose to act by maxims that imply absolute necessity in order to judge themselves and their actions. People can be completely autonomous, regarding themselves as sovereign while making laws, as long as there are not two different laws for the same moral question, as it has to be universal for the Kingdom of Ends to exist. A physician should consider how their actions would contribute to or detract from the moral community. There should be a consideration whether the intended maxim of their actions productively function as a universal rule. This requires that physicians and the healthcare system as a whole must respect the autonomy and rationality of their patients. Physicians who give their patients a placebo would be depriving their patients of an inherent right to autonomy. If every physician gave placebos to every patient when there was no known cure, patients would learn to always distrust their physicians. This would be contradictory to the universal law. "Every action which by itself or by its maxim enables the freedom of each individual's will to co-exist with the freedom of everyone else in accordance