Ah, the placebo effect. Some of you may have heard of it. For those of you that haven’t, it’s a pretty fascinating thing.
Have you ever thought about something, and then noticed that your body had an actual physical reaction? For example, if you focus hard enough on something REALLY sour, you can make the inside of your mouth start to water.
This can happen with our physical and mental health too. Most people wouldn’t suggest that an illness will go away simply if you think about it hard enough. But, no one disputes the fact that our thoughts can impact the severity of illness-related symptoms that we experience.
People with various medical conditions or illnesses can actually improve based only on the belief that they are receiving a medicine. This medicine usually has no biochemical effect on the body. It is a dummy pill, sometimes known as a sugar pill or a placebo.
Many clinical research studies will use a placebo in a certain percentage of volunteers. The placebo serves as a comparison to the investigational treatment. The FDA often requires that a medicine is shown to be more effective than a placebo, in order for it to be approved.
In order to get a clear picture of how effective a medicine is or isn’t, it’s important that both the researcher and the volunteer remain “blinded” to who is receiving study medicine or placebo. This a called a “double-blind placebo controlled clinical trial”. This type of trial helps to prevent bias. For example, if a researcher knows that a volunteer is receiving active study medication, they may assume that the volunteer is getting better. That researcher then carries that bias into all interactions with the volunteer and also may not report the volunteer’s symptoms as accurately. Alternatively, if a research volunteer knows they are receiving an active medication, they may be more likely to report an improvement or side effects that they otherwise would not have noticed.
Clinical research studies are carefully designed to avoid the possibility or “unblinding”, or exposing which medication the volunteer is taking. The chance of unblinding could increase if a volunteer shares too much about their experience with a study medication to another volunteer or the researcher. This could occur on TrialSphere, Facebook or even in the clinics waiting room. In order to minimize this possibility, TrialSphere Research Professional members have the ability to moderate comments and posts made by Research Volunteer members. If a comment is made in the forums or on an article and it could expose sensitive research study data, Research Professional members are encouraged to remove it.
If you’re a Research Volunteer and something you posted gets removed, please don’t take it personally. Clinical research and social media is a relatively new arena and we are doing everything we can to promote open communication between researchers and volunteers, but not risk the integrity of a whole study. Please feel free to chime in below!
TS