Because you don’t know if it’s really a treatment.
Experimental groups are often called treatment groups or treatments even when you’re doing a toxicity test in insects or something else decidedly not medical
I’m not from the field but I think anything done to a patient, effective or not, is technically a treatment. From everyday life: you can give someone the silent treatment, or treat them like a baby, or what have you. Anything that isn’t the default thing you’d do anyway is a treatment. So in medicine I could believe that anything at all that a doctor tells you to do, or does to you, is treatment.
And it would make sense in a controlled trial that “the treatment” would refer to the treatment being tested. It’s a treatment for sure, we just want to find out if it does anything useful!
Not if your blinded I guess. But there is a treatment group. Look up treatment - doesn’t mean it’s effective, it’s just a process or something that affects something else. I’m calling it trick or treatment from here on in.
If the placebo works, then is it a trick?
The actual “one weird trick”.
If you know your investigational therapy is better than a placebo or standard of care, then why do the trial? Just because something is new doesn’t mean it’s good
That’s why there are no clinically proven hiccup cures. There’s no way to be better than placebo when the placebo effect is more than enough to get rid of hiccups instantaneously on its own, even if you know it’s a placebo.
Also: hiccups aren’t bad enough for people to invest money to cure them. And how are you to call the standard cures a placebo? Im not hiccupologist but holding breath is kind of what they all gravitate to and and sounds reasonable when something went wrong with your breath in the first place
I read a few years ago that “rectal digital massage” AKA “Finger in the bum” is a legit treatment for hiccups
That one is likely not placebo but some kind of off-label vagus nerve stimulation
Idk if I’m dumb but I don’t understand your comment. What are you saying exactly? We do trials exactly because we want to test if a treatment is effective or not.
We do trials to determine if a new treatment is safe and effective. Let’s say you got a “miracle drug” that cures whatever disease you’re studying, but it is too toxic and kills patients over time. That drug may get hyped up in early development as a miracle cure, but you need to compare it to something else to be sure the toxicity seen is not driven by something unrelated. This is why it’s not ethical to run late stage trials without a standard of care or placebo control arm, because in this case the standard of care would be the better treatment option.
This concept is called equipoise, as in the two treatments are equally poised to provide benefit to patients at the beginning of the trial. Otherwise if you had enough data to know for certain your new therapy is better, then the trial is unnecessary and it should just be a regular medicine/submitted to a health authority for approval instead of wasting >$100 million dollars on another trial.
Your comment just confuses me more then. Your original comment asked why bother doing a trial at all. But then you answered your own question in response to me. Why did you ask your initial question then if you already knew the correct answer? That’s what’s confusing me.
Funny joke, but it’s not really a trick when it’s part of an agreed to trial. There are most definitely unethical examples when a placebo was administered without it being an agreed to potentiality. However, I wouldn’t want to brand all placebos as tricks.
