Clinical Trials 101: A digression

 I ' m going to take a break from explaining the right way to do clinical trials to say a bit about a really, terribly, awful bad way to do it.That would be homeopathy. The link is to a piece about a consumer organization that is suing CVS for putting homeopathic " remedies " on the shelf next to actual over the counter medications that might do something useful. (A lot of them don ' t really either but that ' s another story.)First there ' s the question of biological plausibility. Homeopathy is radically and irremediably inconsistent with everything we know about physics, chemistry and biology. If we believe everything we have learned since the 19th Century, it ' s absurd and impossible. That means nobody is going to invest in high quality clinical trials of any homeopathic remedy because we already know that they cannot possibly work. Second, there ' s the issue of the placebo effect. Trials of homeopathy are small and poorly controlled (see above). We know that if we give people with some form of physical or emotional complaint an inert substance, many of them will report that they feel better. That ' s not necessarily bad in itself but it ' s definitely bad if it stops them from seeking effective treatment when they don ' t have a self-limiting disease, and especially bad if they have a progressive disease that is going to cause them more pain and disability and maybe kill them.The problem is, I know this, everybody who goes to medical school or studies biology...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs