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Physiology & Medicine / "Placebo fraud rocks the very foundation of modern medical science"
« on: 30/10/2010 15:27:32 »
Hi all!
You may have heard about this in the news recently.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1079669/
I was wondering what people make of this news?
http://www.healthypages.co.uk/newsitem.php?news=6380
Copied from the above article:-
Whenever you hear about a placebo-controlled trial you may well give it greater merit than those without. Generally, it is considered more acceptable when a trial is conducted against a placebo as the placebo is supposed to be a neutral ingredient that does not actively produce any effects. On that basis, placebos have been incorporated into trials for decades.
But strange as it may seem, there is no single standard for what a placebo is. In fact the Annals of Internal Medicine journal very recently published an article with the headline "What's In Placebos: Who Knows?"
In most placebo controlled trials, the volunteers are split into two groups. One is given the active drug or ingredient that is on trial and the other group are given a placebo; a pill without the drug in it. Both groups need to believe they are taking the drug so that human factors such as ‘belief’ or ‘expectation of results’ does not interfere with the trial.
There is however, one major problem with the placebo according to Professor Beatrice Golomb, MD from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, and that is: "There isn't anything actually known to be physiologically inert. On top of that, there are no regulations about what goes into placebos, and what is in them is often determined by the makers of the drug being studied, who have a vested interest in the outcome.”
Golomb first made these observations public in two letters sent to the Nature journal over 15 years ago.
The problem said Golomb is that "A positive or negative effect of the placebo can lead to the misleading appearance of a negative or positive effect of the drug," adding that "An effect in the same direction as the drug can lead a true effect of the drug to be lost. These concerns aren't just theoretical.”
As 15 years had gone by since she first wrote the letters, Golomb wondered it=f there had been any improvement in the use of the placebo. Golomb and colleagues checked the randomized trials over the last two years to find out how many had disclosed the contents of the placebo. They found that less than 10% of trials had disclosed the placebo contents.
Summing up, Golomb said, "How often study results are affected by what's in the placebo is hard to say -- because, as this study showed, most of the time we have no idea what the placebo is."
When it comes to the health industry, I tend to agree "to some extent" with this guy Mike Adams views (on this issue)
http://www.naturalnews.com/030209_placebo_medical_fraud.html
It's amazing how medical scientists will get rough and tough when attacking homeopathy, touting how their own medicine is "based on the gold standard of scientific evidence!" and yet when it really comes down to it, their scientific evidence is just a jug of quackery mixed with a pinch of wishful thinking and a wisp of pseudoscientific gobbledygook, all framed in the language of scientism by members of the FDA who wouldn't recognize real science if they tripped and fell into a vat full of it.
what does everybody else think of this?
You may have heard about this in the news recently.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1079669/
I was wondering what people make of this news?
http://www.healthypages.co.uk/newsitem.php?news=6380
Copied from the above article:-
Whenever you hear about a placebo-controlled trial you may well give it greater merit than those without. Generally, it is considered more acceptable when a trial is conducted against a placebo as the placebo is supposed to be a neutral ingredient that does not actively produce any effects. On that basis, placebos have been incorporated into trials for decades.
But strange as it may seem, there is no single standard for what a placebo is. In fact the Annals of Internal Medicine journal very recently published an article with the headline "What's In Placebos: Who Knows?"
In most placebo controlled trials, the volunteers are split into two groups. One is given the active drug or ingredient that is on trial and the other group are given a placebo; a pill without the drug in it. Both groups need to believe they are taking the drug so that human factors such as ‘belief’ or ‘expectation of results’ does not interfere with the trial.
There is however, one major problem with the placebo according to Professor Beatrice Golomb, MD from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, and that is: "There isn't anything actually known to be physiologically inert. On top of that, there are no regulations about what goes into placebos, and what is in them is often determined by the makers of the drug being studied, who have a vested interest in the outcome.”
Golomb first made these observations public in two letters sent to the Nature journal over 15 years ago.
The problem said Golomb is that "A positive or negative effect of the placebo can lead to the misleading appearance of a negative or positive effect of the drug," adding that "An effect in the same direction as the drug can lead a true effect of the drug to be lost. These concerns aren't just theoretical.”
As 15 years had gone by since she first wrote the letters, Golomb wondered it=f there had been any improvement in the use of the placebo. Golomb and colleagues checked the randomized trials over the last two years to find out how many had disclosed the contents of the placebo. They found that less than 10% of trials had disclosed the placebo contents.
Summing up, Golomb said, "How often study results are affected by what's in the placebo is hard to say -- because, as this study showed, most of the time we have no idea what the placebo is."
When it comes to the health industry, I tend to agree "to some extent" with this guy Mike Adams views (on this issue)
http://www.naturalnews.com/030209_placebo_medical_fraud.html
It's amazing how medical scientists will get rough and tough when attacking homeopathy, touting how their own medicine is "based on the gold standard of scientific evidence!" and yet when it really comes down to it, their scientific evidence is just a jug of quackery mixed with a pinch of wishful thinking and a wisp of pseudoscientific gobbledygook, all framed in the language of scientism by members of the FDA who wouldn't recognize real science if they tripped and fell into a vat full of it.
what does everybody else think of this?