Dear Allstat,
I would be grateful of peoples opinions on the scientific merit and of
the ethics of single blind placebo run-ins?
I have read the paper by Stephen Senn and the paper by Lawrence Ramsay
both in the BMJ and also the paper by Martin Evans in the Journal of
medical ethics. There does however, appear to be a paucity of
literature in this area. Is this simply because people do not feel that
it is an issue? The most common reason that I see for using a single
blind placebo run-in is to weed out non-compliant participants and yet I
have been unable to find any recent literature upholding this method.
All comments gratefully received and if there is sufficient interest
then I will summarise the responses for the list.
Many thanks,
Gordon Taylor
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