Placebo controls: historical, methodological and general aspects

Placebo controls: historical, methodological and general aspects.

Control conditions were introduced through the trial of Mesmerism in Paris. Placebo controls became codified standard in 1946. Although seemingly unchallenged, there are various problems with this received view. The notion of a placebo is only defined from the negative. A positive notion proposed that placebo effects are effects owing to the meaning an intervention has for an individual. Thus, ...

Machine Learning: A Historical and Methodological Analysis

Machine learning has always been an integral part of artificial intelligcncc, and it.s methodology has evolved in concert, with the major concerns of the field In response to the dificulties of encoding evcrincreasing vohlmes of knowledge in modeln hI syst.ems, many rcsearchers have recently turned their attention to machiuc learning as a means to overcome the knowledge acquisition bottleneck T...

Infant learning: Historical, conceptual, and methodological challenges.

Acquiring knowledge about the underlying structures of the environment presents a number of challenges for a naive learner. These challenges include the absence of reinforcement to guide learning, the presence of numerous information sources from which only a select few are relevant, and the uncertainty about when an underlying structure may have undergone a change. A crucial implication of the...

Therapeutic beneficence and placebo controls.

Surgical "placebo" controls.

OBJECTIVE To set ethical guidelines on the use of surgical placebo controls in the design of surgical trials. BACKGROUND DATA Ethical concerns recently arose from surgical trials where subjects in the control arm underwent surgical procedures that had the appearance of a therapeutic intervention, but during which the essential therapeutic maneuver was omitted. Although there are ethical guide...