title: Terminating a trial -- the ethical problem.
abstract: A comparative clinical trial will often lead to the conclusion that one regimen is clearly better than another. Should the estimated difference in the regimens be large and precisely determined, continuation of the trial would constitute abuse of the participants. Some earlier proposals for ethical decision making on continuing a trial are shown to be unsatisfactory, and a more general framework for dealing with the problem is proposed.
mesh_terms: D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic; D035061:Control Groups; D003657:Decision Making; D004341:Drug Evaluation / Q000379:methods; D004995:Ethics, Professional; D006805:Human Experimentation; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D012107:Research Design; D018570:Risk Assessment; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D035501:Uncertainty