Surgical “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...

Therapeutic beneficence and placebo controls.

Surgical Placebo in Jewish Law

Background Placebos have been used in one form or another for at least two centuries.1 Researchers in the late eighteenth century, in an attempt to establish science as a sound discipline separate from unorthodox and unconventional fi elds of treatment and therapy, recognized the idea of confounding environmental and psychological factors and attempted to mitigate them as best possible. For mos...

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.