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The definition of placebo has been debated. [17] One definition states that a treatment process is a placebo when none of the characteristic treatment factors are effective (remedial or harmful) in the patient for a given disease .
The word placebo was used in a medicinal context in the late 18th century to describe a "commonplace method or medicine" and in 1811 it was defined as "any medicine adapted more to please than to benefit the patient". Although this definition contained a derogatory implication, [ 1] it did not necessarily imply that the remedy had no effect.
Placebo-controlled study. Placebo-controlled studies are a way of testing a medical therapy in which, in addition to a group of subjects that receives the treatment to be evaluated, a separate control group receives a sham "placebo" treatment which is specifically designed to have no real effect. Placebos are most commonly used in blinded ...
Treatment and control groups. In the design of experiments, hypotheses are applied to experimental units in a treatment group. [ 1] In comparative experiments, members of a control group receive a standard treatment, a placebo, or no treatment at all. [ 2] There may be more than one treatment group, more than one control group, or both.
A scientific control is an experiment or observation designed to minimize the effects of variables other than the independent variable (i.e. confounding variables ). [ 1] This increases the reliability of the results, often through a comparison between control measurements and the other measurements. Scientific controls are a part of the ...
Henry Knowles Beecher (February 4, 1904 [ 1] – July 25, 1976 [ 2]) was a pioneering American anesthesiologist, medical ethicist, and investigator of the placebo effect at Harvard Medical School . An article by Beecher's in 1966 on unethical medical experimentation in the New England Journal of Medicine — "Ethics and Clinical Research ...
The combined oral contraceptive pill ( COCP ), often referred to as the birth control pill or colloquially as " the pill ", is a type of birth control that is designed to be taken orally by women. It is the oral form of combined hormonal contraception. The pill contains two important hormones: a progestin (a synthetic form of the hormone ...
The number needed to treat ( NNT) or number needed to treat for an additional beneficial outcome ( NNTB) is an epidemiological measure used in communicating the effectiveness of a health-care intervention, typically a treatment with medication. The NNT is the average number of patients who need to be treated to prevent one additional bad ...