Dan Strickland
Aug 24, 2017 · 1 min read

Interesting article, although there’s a fundamental misunderstanding. The RCT is ethical not because we offer a placebo that is ‘powerful’. We are doing the trial because we do not know if the treatment works, therefore before it goes into clinical practice, safety and effectiveness must be determined on willing, informed study subjects. A side note, most RCTs nowadays compare the new treatment against current standard treatment, not against nothing.

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    Dan Strickland

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    Epidemiologist & teacher, mostly retired. Old Korea hand