Toward a more ethical clinical trial

SummaryCurrent methods of conducting clinical trials require the patient to agree to have his treatment assigned randomly, where his individual characteristics are taken into account only to balance the treatment groups. A Bayesian alternative involves eliciting the prior opinions of the group of clinicians who designed the study. Each patient is then guaranteed that the treatment he will receive is the best for him either in the opinion of at least one individual clinician or as a consensus of several, given the patient’s characteristics and all the information available from the trial when the assignment is made.

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