On Fri, 2003-12-12 at 16:15, Henry Spencer wrote:

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, William Park wrote:

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Placebo effect is powerful, and it's the reason why tests of things like new drugs absolutely must be done as "double-blind" tests: neither the patients nor the experimenters know which patients are getting the real pills and which are getting the dummies, until the experiment is over and the sealed envelopes are opened.

Those who died were given placebo, and those who got better were given real drug. Or, was it the other way around... :-)

Well, at least the large-scale experiments typically also have third-party monitors, who know which group is which and are watching for signs of strong adverse effects (death certainly qualifies :-)). This is why you occasionally hear of a clinical trial being halted early -- it means that the real-drug group was having a suspiciously large number of heart attacks or whatever, and the monitors sounded the alarm.

Actually, on occasion, long term studies are halted early for the exact opposite reason. In fact recently a 10 year study of a certain drug treatment on breast cancer was halted 6 years in so that those on the placebo could take the real treatment because the results were so positive. I forget the details anymore though. -- Marcus Brubaker <marcus.brubaker-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml