These areas are covered well in the first two parts of the book. Secondly, by using our knowledge about the use of placebos and the placebo effect in clinical research he shows why the randomised clinical trial is the cornerstone of evidence based medicine-by indicating exactly what the purpose of the placebo control is and why it is so difficult to gather information on the placebo effect (trials of a placebo against a group of participants who receive no intervention at all cannot be double blind). For instance, in a trial of a drug the “placebo effect” is not the same as any effect found in a control group, as this will result from other factors as well, such as spontaneous improvement. Firstly, by treating the randomised clinical trial as the standard research tool for evaluating the effects of healthcare interventions the author explains why some of the supposed facts about the placebo effect are wrong. Instead W Grant Thompson has elegantly summarised the past 50 years of research into the placebo effect and presents the findings in the context of randomised clinical trials and evidence based medicine. My initial thought was that this was just another book on the placebo effect, but I was wrong.
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