THE FOOLISHNESS OF SOME CLINICAL TRIALS.

THE FOOLISHNESS OF SOME CLINICAL TRIALS. I have posted before about the misuse of those clinical trials which require the control group to use existing therapies for which there is already abundant data. For example, I posted here last year on an earlier article by Amy Harmon about a young man with Lou Gehrig’s disease who was placed in a control group which only received a placebo rather than the experimental drug. I asked there: “how could withholding the drug in a small sample in a clinical trial ever add to what we know about what happens with untreated Lou Gehrig’s disease from the large numbers of people who have died from it?” I suspect that the reason for these unnecessary control groups is cosmetic. It makes the experiment look more like other experiments in which a control group does serve a purpose.