Tip:
We aren't comparing the effect of the treatment (tx) to the effect of placebo.
We are *defining* the effect as the *difference* in outcome between those allocated to standard of care (SoC) + tx to those allocated to SoC + placebo, where placebo is used for blinding.
I am very confused - did I read this correctly? There's a new meta-analysis out of pre-post effects sizes in the placebo arm of trials. The authors acknowledge regression to the mean is counted as part of the "placebo response".
ja.ma/4aA9V6M
Ask me about the time I casually let slip the placebo word when I was teaching concepts of western pharmacology to a classroom full of students of traditional Tibetan medicine. Kpow! Boom! Tough fight out of that one.
We're not really even doing that. We can't always use a placebo.
We're trying to make any differences between the groups attributable only to treatment or chance. We can quantify chance so we can indirectly quantify the treatment effect. And the indirectness is what confuses the hell out of people.
