Trial and error: can good science be bad medicine?
Earlier this year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a breakthrough in AIDS research: A study conducted in Thailand showed that a new method of AZT treatment could cut the transmission of HIV from pregnant women to their babies by half. While this was certainly good news for the thousands of HIV-infected women in the developing world, it was not such good news for half of the women who participated in the study. As part of the study, these women received placebos— sugar pills—that have no effect on HIV transmission. Of the babies born to these women, 18 now have HIV who need not have been infected. While the new treatment may save many more lives, we should question whether researchers were right to trade those 18 babies for this benefit. In the pages of medical journals and, increasingly, in the popular press, doctors and others have been doing just that.