This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Dermatology  • Quality of Care  • Evidence-Based Medicine  • Randomized Controlled Trial  • Dermatology, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Arch Dermatol. 2001;137:1639-1640.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Is the Placebo Powerless? An Analysis of Clinical Trials Comparing Placebo With No Treatment
Hrobjartsson A, Gotzsche PC
N Engl J Med.
2000;344:1594-1602

Placebo treatments have been reported to help patients with many diseases, but the quality of the evidence supporting this finding has not been rigorously evaluated. The objective of Hrobjartsson and Gotzsche's study was to conduct a meta-analysis of clinical trials in which patients were randomly assigned to either treatment with placebo or no treatment. A placebo could be pharmacological (eg, a tablet), physical (eg, a manipulation), or psychological (eg, a conversation). They systematically searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsychLIT, Biological Abstracts, and the Cochrane Controlled Trials Register for trials published before the end of 1998. They included only trials with concealed random assignment, masked outcome assessment, and dropout rates of less than 50%. For each trial with binary outcomes (eg, stroke or no stroke), they calculated the relative risk . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Editor's Comment



CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?