ArticleMedicine, health care, and philosophy2022
The 'false hope' argument in discussions on expanded access to investigational drugs: a critical assessment.
Article in Medicine, health care, and philosophy, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 9 citations in OpenAlex.
- Responses to Commentaries on "Ethics as if Your Life Depended on It".Journal of empirical research on human research ethics : JERHRE · 2026Article
- Ethical considerations of prospective data collection for stereotactic arrhythmia radioablation (STAR): an overview from the STOPSTORM.eu consortium.Strahlentherapie und Onkologie : Organ der Deutschen Rontgengesellschaft ... [et al] · 2026Article
- Therapeutic Misconception as a Problem of Nonmaleficence by Way of False Hope.Health care analysis : HCA : journal of health philosophy and policy · 2026Article
- Equity and capacity to benefit from early access to medicines schemes.International journal for equity in health · 2025Review
- Where There's Hope, There's Life 1 : On the Importance of Hope in Health Care.The Journal of medicine and philosophy · 2025Article
- Balancing ethical norms and duties for the introduction of new medicines through conditional marketing authorization: a research agenda.Frontiers in medicine · 2024Article
- Do Physicians Have a Duty to Discuss Expanded Access to Investigational Drugs with their Patients? A Normative Analysis.The Journal of law, medicine & ethics : a journal of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
When seriously ill patients reach the end of the standard treatment trajectory for their condition, they may qualify for the use of unapproved, investigational drugs regulated via expanded access programs. In medical-ethical discourse, it is often argued that expanded access to investigational drugs raises 'false hope' among patients and is therefore undesirable. We set out to investigate what is meant by the false hope argument in this discourse. In this paper, we identify and analyze five versions of the false hope argument which we call: (1) the limited chance at benefit argument, (2) the side effects outweighing benefits argument, (3) the opportunity costs argument, (4) the impossibility of making informed decisions argument, and (5) the difficulty of gaining access argument. We argue that the majority of these five versions do not provide normative ground for disqualifying patients' hopes as false. Only when hope is rooted in a mistaken belief, for example, about the likelihood of benefits or chances on medical risks, or when hope is directed at something that cannot possibly be obtained, should it be considered false. If patients are adequately informed about their odds of obtaining medical benefit, however small, and about the risks associated with an investigational treatment, it is unjustified to consider patients' hopes to be false, and hence, to deny them access to investigational drug based on that argument.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.