What is a double-blind placebo controlled trial and why is it so important?
In attempting to examine the validity of any treatment for any problem, there are two well known effects that confound the assessment. The “placebo effect” is a real phenomenum in which a patient will subjectively feel better and may even perform better on tests when he or she thinks that he or she is being treated by an authority figure. Another problem is that the researcher doing the trial really wants the treatment to be effective. The researcher will unconsciously evaluate people receiving the treatment as doing better than people not receiving the treatment if he knows which are which. The double blind trial is designed to prevent these effects. In its simplest form, patients are randomly assigned to either receive the treatment being evaluated, or a placebo, a sham treatment which mimics the real treatment. Neither the patient, nor the researchers know which patients are in which groups. This way, the evaluation of the patient’s progress is unbiased by any preknowledge of the po
