The rights of patients in research

Abstract
The patients certainly seemed to have been forgotten in the notorious case of the “trial” of the complementary treatment offered to women with breast cancer by the Bristol Cancer Help Centre.1 The women who had willingly participated in the research knew nothing of the results until they heard on the television news on the evening of 5 September 1990 that those of them who had been to the centre were twice as likely to die and three times as likely to relapse as women who had not been to the centre.