Placebo mania

Abstract

Placebo control should no longer be part of the gold standard. In earlier times it made sense to urge investigators to compare new treatments with placebo, because typically the only alternative to the new treatment was no effective treatment at all. Introducing a placebo facilitated blind assessment and controlled for non-specific aspects of treatment–the “placebo” effect, itself a highly variable but often powerful phenomenon.4 But if blind assessment can be achieved in a …