Clinical equipoise
Clinical equipoise, also known as the principle of equipoise, provides the ethical basis for medical research that involves assigning patients to different treatment arms of a clinical trial. The term was proposed by Benjamin Freedman in 1987 in response to "controversy in the clinical community" to define an ethical situation of “genuine uncertainty within the expert medical community… about the preferred treatment.” This applies also for off-label treatments performed before or during their required clinical trials.