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In a placebo trial, it’s very important that the placebo be statistically independent from the treatment group. You’re basically saying you would change the stu
by 4death4 3y ago
In a placebo trial, it’s very important that the placebo be statistically independent from the treatment group. You’re basically saying you would change the study so the placebo and control were not independent distributions. That would make the study worthless. I don’t know what else to say other than that you have no idea what you’re talking about. No where did the authors say they’re only studying ascorbate. They explicitly say they’re studying a treatment regime of sodium ascorbate. If you want to study only sodium, then run a RCT with only sodium chloride. Comparing sodium chloride to sodium ascorbate is not the way to study the effect of sodium.
- carbocation 3y ago> In a placebo trial, it’s very important that the placebo be statistically independent from the treatment group. Statistical independence has nothing to do with our conversation, which is about designing an appropriate set of comparator groups to enable valid inference about the hypothesis. I’m afraid I don’t have time to continue a discussion where we have to pretend that the authors - who have identified sodium as a confounder for their hypothesis - actually wanted to study sodium.
- 4death4 3y agoStatistic independence has everything to do with it. If your control and treatment groups are not independent, you can’t differentiate a case where both groups experience an effect vs. both groups experiencing no effect. Please explain how that would work in your experiment.