Abstract
IT is often believed that there exist, in the community, certain individuals who are ‘placebo reactors’, and that these individuals must be excluded from a controlled clinical trial if the ‘true’ effects of the drug in question are to be correctly assessed. Glaser1 expressed the extreme view when he wrote “a dummy” [that is, a pharmacologically inert substance] “identifies those patients who can be disregarded, either because they need no treatment or else because they can be cured by psychological influences, and this is as reasonable a procedure as the exclusion from experiments with anti-asthmatic drugs of patients who do not have attacks of bronchial asthma”.
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References
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PARKHOUSE, J. Placebo Reactor. Nature 199, 308 (1963). https://doi.org/10.1038/199308a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/199308a0
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