ethicist

“Then, I just flopped back down on my back and experienced this overwhelming feeling of absolute bliss,” Leier, an ethicist at the University of Alberta in Canada, told Salon in a phone interview.

As an ethicist, her role was to ask questions, including uncomfortable ones: “Is this a good thing?”

In medicine, when there is genuine uncertainty as to whether the benefits of a treatment outweigh the harms - called equipoise - some ethicists argue there's a moral obligation to scientifically study such treatments.

Eli Shupe, a medical ethicist at the University of Texas at Arlington and the author of the paper, said she was shocked to learn about this practice.

That policy “cannot withstand critical scrutiny,” say the authors of the editorial, David Shalowitz, a gynecologic oncologist and bioethicist at West Michigan Cancer Center, and Franklin Miller, an ethicist at Weill Cornell Medicine.