TIDieR-Placebo: A guide and checklist for reporting placebo and sham controls

[Better Reporting of Interventions: Template for Intervention Description and Replication (TIDieR) Checklist and Guide].

Without a complete published description of interventions, clinicians and patients cannot reliably implement interventions that are shown to be useful, and other researchers cannot replicate or build on research findings. The quality of description of interventions in publications, however, is remarkably poor. To improve the completeness of reporting, and ultimately the replicability, of interv...

Placebo Analgesia, Acupuncture and Sham Surgery

Invasive procedures, such as surgery and acupuncture, are likely better than the others in terms of eliciting placebo analgesia. Understanding how invasive procedures can elicit enhanced placebo responses may provide new insights into mechanisms underlying placebo analgesia. In this essay, it is argued that sensory, cognitive and emotional factors are major determinants of the magnitude of plac...

A review and analysis of placebo treatments, placebo effects, and placebo controls in trials of medical procedures when sham is not inert.

Researchers examining the efficacy of medical procedures make assumptions about the nature of placebo. From these assumptions they select the sham interventions to be used in their trials. However, placebo is not well defined. A number of definitions are contradictory and sometimes misleading. This leads to problems in sham-controlled studies of medical procedures and difficulties interpreting ...

Therapeutic beneficence and 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...