Conflict Over Approaching One's Patients Posted on October 22, 2007 Rachel Manber (bio) considers an ethical dilemma in recruitment.

I think the reason that there is a sense of competition within yourself when you’re trying to approach a patient who’s your patient for research, is how is it going to be looked? I mean, you have a relationship with a patient whereby the patient comes to you for help, and if you ask them to participate in your study, they might feel used. So you have that conflict inside of you that I don’t feel comfortable doing, so I don’t tend to refer patients to my own studies unless it’s in a different domain that I don’t practice treating.

So, for example, I’m treating insomnia and lots of comorbidities do occur. And I happen to do research on depression, so if I have a patient who does not have other resources for depression treatment, then I would refer them out to the community and give them names of all sorts of people and say, “Oh, by the way, there are also this and this and this studies that are ongoing,” and I might include my own study. So that’s how I might end up resolving that conflict. But this is a very delicate issue.

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