You are reading a single comment by @useless and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
-
... would they then be willing to be given placebos?
You're talking about a double-blind trial, which is the gold standard, but is obviously not always feasible for medical situations where it's pretty obvious whether the procedure has taken place.
Where a double-blind isn't possible, there are other sort of trial that can also give good results - they just need potentially more care given to the statistical analysis and potential confounding factors.
useless
Thanks to you and @Velocio for the info and perspectives on this. It's not something that has been in my circle of experience.
I will keep my thoughts on any rights or wrongs out of this as I'm not sure it would be helpful but I struggle to see how a trial could be run fairly.
From a process viewpoint, it would be interesting to know is how many prepubescent people are currently on these blockers in the uk compared to the number of people in the average mass clinical trial, I would imagine small.
Another problem from a trial pov is how do you find minors to take part in a clinical trial like this where they don't have personal agency to make a decision and those who can get parental permission would they then be willing to be given placebos?
I would expect the NHS or drug companies have data for all sorts of stuff including standardised bone and brain development for the general population so why does a trial have to be double blind if you have baseline data to work from?