For commentary: Meanwhile, more and more studies on detoxing opioid-dependent society, maintain patients with opioid agonosts, track long-term recidivism rates, etc, etc, etc, utilize hapless “control” groups that receive placebo, and whose death rate in the studies are not infrequently the basis for concluding that placebo aren’t so great in absolute or relative terms.

Sure there are a great many clinical interventions where placebo is indicated. But the Helsinki Convention clearly states that placebos are only justified when no treatment is available that is

known to have a modicum of efficacy. Those experts and politicians who demand ever more and moe clinical trials to prove what is already known, or what is intuitively clear strictly on a common sense basis, should take heed. A brilliant composition just arised in the British Medical Journal documenting the total absence of “placebo-controlled random assignment clinical trials” that “prove” that it really is the parachute that protects against injury and death when citizens jump out of airplanes.

Original post by RGNewman, MD