

Is the Ebola Crisis a Reason to Skip Randomized Controlled Trials? - tokenadult
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/is-the-ebola-crisis-a-reason-to-skip-rcts/

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gus_massa
Just an idea. Let's supouse that "doing nothing" is not political aceptable.

If there are two proposed treatments A and B, is it possible to make a double
blind randomized controlled trial between A and B. At lest we will get some
useful information like "A is better than B" or "A is worse than B" or "they
are equivalent". This elude the "placebo group is receiving no treatment"
complain.

It still doesn't solve the problem of "is treatment A better than nothing".
The mortality rate is very different from place to place. In some places doing
nothing is really doing absolutely nothing but in other places "nothing"
includes intra venous rehydratation and perhaps some elementary care that is
seams obvious but is not availed in very poor places.

Sooner or later we will need a "treatment vs placebo" experiment, but perhaps
this "A vs B" experiment can be a temporary solution.

