5 ms·
The point is that without a control group there's no way to know.
by iamthepieman 5y ago
The point is that without a control group there's no way to know.
- texasbigdata 5y agoI drove to Germany to see the machines. Spoke to the doc admistering it. It's a potentially painful almost full day procedure. We discussed the placebo thing. I'm not an expert on medical ethics but personally I would not want to be intubated (potentially wrong word) into that thing for hours and not get treatment.
- nradov 5y agoThat's not strictly true. Consider our complete set of medical knowledge today. What percentage of that knowledge came from studies with control groups?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- yamrzou 5y agoWhen experimenting with new treatments, a control group is very important. Otherwise the study could be biased in favor or against the treatment. Even when a control group is present, a poorly-designed experiment could later turn out to be problematic, such as the Diethylstilbestrol (DES) medical tragedy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol). In that case, studies that were in favor of the treatment were poorly-designed and used historical controls instead of contemporaneous ones.
- inciampati 5y agoIt's about the fraction of that medical knowledge is likely to be revised when considering new controlled studies.
- nradov 5y agoOver a sufficiently long time horizon the fraction of medical knowledge likely to be revised approaches 1. That includes all knowledge generated from controlled studies.
- costcopizza 5y agoNo, there is a way to know, just not the way you want to know.
- iamthepieman 5y agoAd hoc trials? Aka testing in production.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 5y agoObservational studies, which are much more frequent than randomized trials and just as effective, if not more.
- _3u10 5y agoEven with a control group, there's no way to know.
- somewhereoutth 5y agoSomething about parachutes