Placebo Controls: Now???

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...

Therapeutic beneficence and placebo controls.

Placebo controls in randomized trials of acupuncture.

Considerable intellectual and practical effort has been expended on designing and evaluating placebo controls in acupuncture studies. Somewhat less attention has been paid to the question: Why use a placebo in a randomized trial of acupuncture? This is partly because placebo controls have generally been seen as an inherent part of randomized trial methodology. As a result, most acupuncture tria...

Placebo controls: scientific and ethical issues.

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, ...