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PI Brief Update

Experimental Medicine and Pioneering Patients - David Locke, Hill Dickinson LLP

19/07/17. There are undoubtedly terminally ill patients who wish to pursue non-standard treatments in the hope of finding an unexpected cure, and there are even patients who wish to altruistically volunteer to trial experimental medicines unrelated to their own condition, in order to derive meaning and purpose from a hopeless situation. In the medical professional there have always been doctors and surgeons who are willing to work with such patients to push beyond accepted practice and lead in the advancement of medical science. The question for the law is how to balance these competing interests, rights and duties.

The usefulness of the Bolam test as the mechanism for establishing the breach of a legal duty of care where a patient has been injured in such circumstances is debatable. A novel treatment may axiomatically be unsupported by a responsible body of contemporaneous medical opinion; therefore on strict application it must be negligent. There is a concern that...

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All information on this site was believed to be correct by the relevant authors at the time of writing. All content is for information purposes only and is not intended as legal advice. No liability is accepted by either the publisher or the author(s) for any errors or omissions (whether negligent or not) that it may contain. 

The opinions expressed in the articles are the authors' own, not those of Law Brief Publishing Ltd, and are not necessarily commensurate with general legal or medico-legal expert consensus of opinion and/or literature. Any medical content is not exhaustive but at a level for the non-medical reader to understand. 

Professional advice should always be obtained before applying any information to particular circumstances.

Excerpts from judgments and statutes are Crown copyright. Any Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of OPSI and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland under the Open Government Licence.