Exploiting Hope: How the Promise of New Medical Interventions Sustains Us—and Makes Us Vulnerable by Jeremy Snyder (review)

The book engages with hope in the setting of phase I cancer trials, stem cell interventions, right-to-try laws and crowd funding, offering a new language to explain our discomfort with some of these quests. The book’s main claim consists of three components: (1) There is something special about hope in the health care setting, (2) Thwarting of such hope creates a distinctive wrong: exploitation, (3) Such exploitation of hope is a problem of respect and a failure to fulfil a specified duty of beneficence. [...]he illustrates that misunderstanding is not just about simple information provision, by illustrating the diverse origins and targets of hope. Snyder submits that hope may be instrumental for individuals as a means to feel in control of one’s destiny, but wonders if a patients’ feeling of control and hope would be reasonable to trade off for a tumour, a serious concern with stem cell interventions, or for a significant loss of money.