Conflicting Obligations

Abstract

This article considers the problem of conflicting researcher obligations in RHM, particularly when professional medical rhetoric is analyzed with the goal of improving patient care. Taking one case as illustrative, this article argues that medical professional participants are in positions of relative power, and that their choice to participate in RHM research or not can have downstream effects on more vulnerable patients. Furthermore, this case demonstrates that the interests of medical professional participants may diverge from the interests of their patients. As a result, when RHM researchers assume traditional orientations towards medical professional research participants, they may find themselves unable to advocate for more vulnerable patient populations.

Celebrating Unexpected Research Questions

“…RHM scholars do often ask thorny, complicated research questionshighlighted, for example, in a special section of Rhetoric of Health & Medicine (RHM) 3.4 focused on ethical questions, including pieces that examined the ethics of representation (Carrion 2020) and conflicting ethical obligations in human subjects research (Reed 2020). We editors have each asked various unexpected questions in our research as RHM scholars, some of which have been drawn from personal experience and from ideas we encountered well beyond the field.…”