The Placebo Effect or Not?

By Lance Winslow
Okay so, when they give clinical trials to test a new drug, we know that they give people who have serious ailments the new drug, and then a group of people the placebo. Then they study the difference between the individuals to see if they work or not. That seems like a nice way to do human trials for a new drug, however what is in the placebo, does affect the outcome of the results.

Nevertheless, what's in the placebo generally is not known, nor is it normally reported in the research papers. But I would submit to you that there is no such thing is zero, if there is something the placebo is made out of, and therefore we need to know what's in the pill, and what compounds it consists of.

There was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal posted on October 28, 2010 titled; "Hey, What's in That Placebo?" and it spoke of a recent research paper titled; "What's in Placebos: Who Knows? Analysis of Randomized, Controlled Trials," by B.A. Colomb, LC Erickson, S. Kopershi, D Sack, M Enkin, and J. Howick, which was published in the Journal of Internal Medicine in October.

Now then, I'd like you to go look this research up and then come back to this article, as I think we need to talk about this, and perhaps suggest some serious changes to the over all process of clinical human trials for pharmaceuticals.

Perhaps, we can figure out a different way to do this, because as it stands we may be cheating ourselves out of the scientific research and results which we seek. And yes, it does matter, because these are human trials, involving real human beings, and we shouldn't waste their volunteer efforts. Likewise, the results we get are quite important and we need to make sure that the drugs we test will work in the real world, otherwise we are dealing with falsely manipulated data. Please consider all this.