2 replies to this topic

[Freebytes]

http://asserttrue.bl...ugar-pills.html

I found this interesting. There was a discussion on some of the C60 forums about this a month or two ago.

[niner]

Wow, that's pretty interesting. The post is about active placebos and how they might skew a drug trial. Also brought up is the idea of removing "placebo effect-prone" people from the study. As long as they're removed from both the active and placebo arms using the same criteria, then I think that's a fine idea. If they're only removed from the placebo arm, then it's fraud. More info needed there. In the replies, this post stood out:

Having worked in the pharma industry, this article is complete bullshit.

For double and triple blind (the third blind comes from not even the pharma company knowing the blinding details until after the trial) placebo design is an extraordinarily complex undertaking. A placebo must match the drug in physical appearance, taste, texture, density, state (liquid/solid/gas), and anticipated side effects. Any material difference in any of these categories renders the trial completely and totally meaningless, because at a minimum it unblinds the doctors on the ground.

Pointing out a few random oversights out of the thousands of clinical trials that occur every year is not proof of evil on the part of pharma; it is a testament to the care that goes into their design. It represents a defect rate virtually unmatched in any other industry.
But sure, go ahead and advocate irresponsible alarmism over a non-issue, as if though drug trials aren't already expensive enough, retarding scientific progress and costing millions of lives from drugs that would have been otherwise developed.

The blogger's response was a little defensive. He said he never called Pharma "evil"...

[Freebytes]

Not even specifying the placebo (which until I started reading here I always assumed to be sucrose) is somewhat troubling. You could simply put the substances in opaque pills, and they would not be seen; however, I can also understand if they are required to make both substances appear to be the same. (This, in my mind, is actually pretty challenging and could result in a placebo being active even if the active effects were unintentional in an attempt to make them appear the same.)

One of the aspects of our trial regarding C60 that I was considering was making sure the placebos were similar. Food dye perhaps could be used to make them appear to be a similar color, but then again, even food dye may have some unexpected effects. I know that there are people that are allergic to food dye and there are other people that have adverse reactions to it.