Fatal cure

This play deals with the search for a new medicine against AIDS. The ethical question is: who decides how to deal with AIDS? Just the doctors? Or do others, like the patients, also have a say in it? And how far can you go in testing a new medicine?Doctor Victor Tadema is going to conduct a trial (test) for the new medicine Delphyron on the AIDS-ward of a hospital. The patients, being very desperate, demand to take part in the trial, even though they run the risk of being given a placebo (fake pill). Janet Verburgh, Victor’s girl friend unexpectedly returns from Africa, where she has been working in a hospital. After a car-crash in Africa she has received a transfusion with infected blood. She has AIDS. As soon as he hears this, Victor wants to have her examined in hospital. She refuses, because she wants to live while she still can, and not enter the medical circuit. Victor persuades her to at least take part in the Delphyron trial, and he cheats to get her in. Maarten, a young patient, discovers at the taste of his medication that he is getting a placebo. Victor finds out that Janet is also getting a placebo and orders the real Delphyron from a doctor friend in England. However, the side-effects are so terrible that Janet stops taking Delphyron, and leaves Victor because he keeps acting like a doctor, making decisions behind her back. She wants to decide for herself how she wants to live--- or die.In the hospital has the whole trial become useless, because Marteen has smuggled Delphyron in. When Victor confesses that he cheated because of his girl friend, he is temporarily sent on leave.In the last scene he returns to Janet, no longer as a doctor, but as “just a friend”.