As we were a couple of weeks ago—it appears one of the gold–standard methods is most often just gold plated.
Somehow or other yesterday, I wound up on Science 2.0, and discovered an intriguing but infuriating article: If Placebos Are Standards For Trials, What’s In Placebos?. Here’s a sample (leaving out the tasty twist on this research):
[T]he researchers ... found that the placebo ingredients for pills were disclosed in fewer than 10 percent of cases. The nature of the “control” was significantly more likely to be stated for other types of treatments, like injections, acupuncture, or surgery, where people are more likely to question what ‘placebo’ actually means in that context.
“How often study results are affected by what’s in the placebo is hard to say — because, as this study showed, most of the time we have no idea what the placebo is,” Golomb concluded.
For anyone interested in the original research, the abstract is all that’s freely available online; but it’s short and easily understood. (For those with adequate self control, check out this blog post.)
There are all kinds of ways to push research findings via placebo contents, and as another quote from Golomb makes clear, the temptation to do so is very high, since researchers have a vested interest—and the possibility of a lot of money—riding on the study results. The scenario that intrigues me the most, however, is the case in which researchers want to accept the null hypothesis: that of no statistically significant difference between control (placebo) and independent variable (treatment).
Think about it: if you’ve been hard at work for years, trying to formulate something like a low-calorie sweetener, what better way to push the data the way you want than to use a placebo that has a small amount of your substance? That might explain how possible excitotoxins like aspartame and monosodium glutamate have been classified by the FDA as “generally regarded as safe”, despite mounting evidence that they are not.
Golomb’s findings leave me questioning much of medical research—particularly recent research, as the pharmaceutical industry has shown itself to be rapacious, and not always honest, in its quest for new profit-making drugs as well as pushing extant, patented drugs to doctors and patients. It’s very sad, how far these professions have fallen.