The FDA: Food and Drug Administration and Ethics

There are few cases in life where things are divided into simple black and white issues. In fact, most decisions and cases that we look at become transformed into shades of gray, where it is generally a matter of opinion. One such example of this can be found in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA is the foremost authority with regards to testing medication. In FDA studies, two groups exist for testing purposes. Though the two groups are very similar in nature, and share many of the same characteristics, such as age, sex, vital signs, and the condition being treated, there is one major difference between the two, in that each is not given the same treatment. One group is given the new medicine, while the other is given a placebo, or a pill with no medicine in it. If the condition of the first group improves over the second group, and no serious side effects are reported, than that medicine is approved for sale and use. However, there are a number of ethical issues that arise from this practice. Namely, is it fair to deny some the life saving medicine they may need, instead giving them nothing but a sugar pill? Is it ethical to treat human beings as guinea pigs for new medicine, even though they may have serious health consequences? Although these questions cannot be technically answered, we can analyze the situation further by looking at the four approaches to ethics, and how they might be applied to this situation.