‘Sham Surgery’ Control Groups: Ethics and Context

Ethics of sham surgery: perspective of patients.

Sham surgery is used as a control condition in neurosurgical clinical trials in Parkinson's disease (PD) but remains controversial. This study aimed to assess the perspective of patients with PD and the general public on the use of sham surgery controls. We surveyed consecutive patients from a university-based neurology outpatient clinic and a community-based general internal medicine practice....

Science and ethics of sham surgery: a survey of Parkinson disease clinical researchers.

BACKGROUND Sham surgery is used in neurosurgical clinical trials in Parkinson disease (PD) but remains controversial. The controversy may be compounded when gene-transfer technologies are tested in sham surgical trials. OBJECTIVE To determine the perspective of PD clinical researchers on the science and ethics of sham-surgery controls when used to test novel interventions such as gene transfe...

Sham surgery controls are

Debate continues about the ethics of sham surgery controls. The most powerful argument for sham surgery controls is that rigorous experiments are needed to demonstrate safety and efficacy of surgical procedures. Without such experiments, there is danger of adopting worthless procedures in clinical practice. Opponents of sham surgery controls argue that sham surgery constitutes unacceptable viol...

Sham Surgery and Reasonable Risk

Sham Surgery and Reasonable Risks

O of the most fundamental tensions within clinical research arises from the need to balance the goal of advancing the frontiers of science in order to improve the standard of care available to future persons with the goal of responding with diligence and compassion to the important interests and health needs of the research participants who make such progress possible (Jonas 1969; see also Lond...