Once emerging data from each of these trials indicated statistically significant benefit from circumcision in reducing the risk of becoming HIV-positive, equipoise was disturbed, making it seem ethically imperative to stop the trials.
Carbon atoms neighbouring N-atoms incorporated due to doping, possess a substantially high positive charge density to equipoise the strong electron affinity of the nitrogen atom.
Moreover, it is not clear that futile striving necessarily has negative aesthetic value, witness, e.g., Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, and in any case, it can be argued plausibly that the equipoise of opposing forces possibly has positive aesthetic value, implying that opposed volitional activities of coexistent omnipotent beings would not necessarily be futile.
They suggest that these trials were designed after so much preliminary work that they were bound to be positive (design bias) and that this violates clinical equipoise, which they characterize as an antiquated concept that should be replaced by a focus on subject autonomy in decision making and expected value for all treatments in a trial.
Although there is a consequence for patients in the trial – being randomised to therapies when there is equipoise – the impact of this false positive error could be in the main on the sponsor or funder i.e. sponsors spend more money and resources on the 'wrong' study that will not result in a true effect/benefit from the new technology.
Those authors then propose a second concept, namely that equipoise is an outdated concept and should be replaced by concepts of positive expected value (the positive sum of benefits of the two trial treatment arms), and even that subjects could enter a trial with a negative expected value as long as they are honestly informed of this likelihood.
So, "positive expected outcomes" seems to be an interesting and realistic alternative to equipoise.
One patient (5% of the study population) tested positive in the diagnostic GTT (Coustan criteria); she screened positive by both the Twizzlers and glucola with demonstration of equipoise (receiver operating characteristic [ROC] at ≥140 mg/dL, 0.947, and at ≥130 mg/dL, 0.895, vs. 0.921).
This delicate equipoise has gone.
The songs find equipoise within heartache.
Clinical equipoise, however, caused difficulty.
