Placebo Studies Should be Used in the Health Trials in Pharmacological Research

Introduction

According to survey, held by U.S Department of Health and Human services, by 2007-2008 years approximately one half of U.S. population used at least one prescription drug, 10% of population used more, than five drugs at month, in addition between children one out of five used at least one or even more prescription drugs (Gu, Dillion and Burt 2010). In order that patients receive effective treatment by 1980 U.S. Food and Drug Administration approve special clinical trials1(see Appendix 1 to the definition), that determine drugs' most frequent side-effects and emphasize their effectiveness (U.S. FDA 2012).When assessing the efficiency of a new medicines, it is usual to test the medicaments in a "randomized double-blind placebo controlled trials". In these trials results obtained from experimental2 and control3 arms are compared and the difference is considered. Drug is considered effective if statistically significant difference4 ,often called effect size, between two group is detected. Other way the medicine is regarded as ineffective and treatment based on this medicine is not better than treatment via placebo (Wampold 2005). As follows placebo controlled studies are important part of pharmacological research because it emphasizes real treatment effect of developing medicaments and prevents releasing ineffective drugs for sale. The purpose of this project is to argue that placebo studies should be used in the health trials in pharmacological research because these studies determine the real treatment effect of a drug. The first section of this paper will briefly explain what "placebo" is , then clinical trials, based on this effect will be examined. Then, the importance of using placebo studies in medical research ...

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