• cymbal_king@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    If you know your investigational therapy is better than a placebo or standard of care, then why do the trial? Just because something is new doesn’t mean it’s good

    • Ultraviolet@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      That’s why there are no clinically proven hiccup cures. There’s no way to be better than placebo when the placebo effect is more than enough to get rid of hiccups instantaneously on its own, even if you know it’s a placebo.

      • lugal@sopuli.xyz
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        7 months ago

        Also: hiccups aren’t bad enough for people to invest money to cure them. And how are you to call the standard cures a placebo? Im not hiccupologist but holding breath is kind of what they all gravitate to and and sounds reasonable when something went wrong with your breath in the first place

      • AlpacaChariot@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I read a few years ago that “rectal digital massage” AKA “Finger in the bum” is a legit treatment for hiccups

    • dingus@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Idk if I’m dumb but I don’t understand your comment. What are you saying exactly? We do trials exactly because we want to test if a treatment is effective or not.

      • cymbal_king@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        We do trials to determine if a new treatment is safe and effective. Let’s say you got a “miracle drug” that cures whatever disease you’re studying, but it is too toxic and kills patients over time. That drug may get hyped up in early development as a miracle cure, but you need to compare it to something else to be sure the toxicity seen is not driven by something unrelated. This is why it’s not ethical to run late stage trials without a standard of care or placebo control arm, because in this case the standard of care would be the better treatment option.

        This concept is called equipoise, as in the two treatments are equally poised to provide benefit to patients at the beginning of the trial. Otherwise if you had enough data to know for certain your new therapy is better, then the trial is unnecessary and it should just be a regular medicine/submitted to a health authority for approval instead of wasting >$100 million dollars on another trial.

        • dingus@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Your comment just confuses me more then. Your original comment asked why bother doing a trial at all. But then you answered your own question in response to me. Why did you ask your initial question then if you already knew the correct answer? That’s what’s confusing me.