Incidental findings and ancillary-care obligations
Incidental findings and ancillary-care obligations
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DOI：
10.1111/j.1748-720x.2008.00268.x
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发表时间：
2008-06-01
影响因子：
2.1
通讯作者：
Richardson, Henry S.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Richardson, Henry S.
最近关于偶然发现的工作，集中在高科技医学经常产生的模棱两可的结果所带来的难题上，在很大程度上独立于最近关于医学研究人员的辅助护理义务的工作，即研究人员必须处理除所研究的疾病或病症之外的疾病或病症的义务。本文认为，这两个主题在道德上是联系在一起的，特别是，对辅助护理义务的良好理解将使他们集中在偶然发现上。这篇论文阐述并捍卫了一种对辅助护理义务的理解，这种理解是基于这样一种观点，即当参与者签署了一项研究时，他们可能——独立于他们的信仰和期望以及研究人员的信仰和期望——被认为部分地将他们健康的某些方面委托给了研究人员。这种辅助医疗义务的部分委托模式反过来对如何在道德上处理偶然发现具有实质性影响；例如，它表明研究人员没有道德义务去寻找偶然的发现。
Recent work on incidental findings, concentrating on the difficult problems posed by the ambiguous results often generated by high-tech medicine, has proceeded largely independently from recent work on medical researchers' ancillary-care obligations, the obligations that researchers have to deal with diseases or conditions besides the one(s) under study. This paper contends that the two topics are morally linked, and specifcally that a sound understanding of ancillary-care obligations will center them on incidental findings. The paper sets out and defends an understanding of ancillary-care obligations, which is based on the idea that when participants signed up for a study they may - independently of their beliefs and expectations and of those of the researchers - be taken to have partially entrusted certain aspects of their health into the researchers' hands. This partial-entrustment model of ancillary-care obligations, in turn, has substantive implications for how to deal ethically with incidental findings; for instance, it suggests that researchers have no moral obligation to hunt for incidental findings.