Inert placebo or drug-containing pill? You decide, Big Pharma.
Alcuin Bramerton
Thousands of clinical trials have been conducted in recent decades which were designed to compare the effects of new drugs with the effects of drug-free placebo pills. It turns out that these trials were non-scientific frauds. The placebos used in the studies weren't true placebos at all. A review of 167 placebo-controlled trials published in peer-reviewed medical journals in 2008 and 2009 has found that 92 percent of those trials did not describe the ingredients of their placebo pills. This is important. Placebo pills are supposed to be inert. But no pill is physiologically inert in the human system. Even so-called "sugar pills" contain sugar. And sugar isn't inert. If you're running a clinical trial on diabetics, testing the effectiveness of a diabetes drug against a placebo, then obviously your clinical trial is going to make the diabetes drug look better than the placebo if you use sugar pills as your placebo. Diabetes is about blood sugar levels.
Some placebo pills use olive oil, which may actually improve heart health. These placebos are not inert. Other placebo pills use partially-hydrogenated oils which harm heart health. These placebos are not inert either. Yet only eight percent of the clinical trials reviewed bothered to list the placebo ingredients at all. And in America, incredibly, there are no US Food and Drug Administration rules regarding the choice or composition of placebos used in clinical trials. Technically, a clinical trial director could use eye of newt or lizard's legs as placebos, and would not be required to mention such details in the published trial results.
Most of the clinical trials used by pharmaceutical companies to win FDA approval of their drugs are funded by the pharmaceutical companies themselves. And it is a fact that most clinical trials tend to find results which favour the financial interests of the organisation which paid for them. So what is to stop Big Pharma from scheming up the perfect placebo which would harm trial patients just enough to make their own drugs look good by comparison?
Oct. 30, 2010