Placebo Control

The decade following passage of FDAAA has been one of easing standards for drug approvals in the US, most notably with the advent of “break...

On this date 349 years ago, Samuel Pepys relates in his famous diary a remarkable story about an upcoming medical experiment. As far as I ca...

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the use of “Big Data” to identify and solicit potential clinical trial participants. ...

Even by the already-painfully-embarrassingly-low standards of clinical trial enrollment in general, patient enrollment in cancer clinical tr...

One of the unintended consequences of my (admittedly, somewhat impulsive) decision to name this blog is that I get a fair bit of traffic fr...

Ben Goldacre – whose Bad Pharma went on sale today – is fond of using a coin-toss-cheating analogy to describe the problem of "hidde...

I would like to propose a rule for clinical trial benchmarks. This rule may appear so blindingly obvious that I run the risk of seeming simp...

I know it’s not even August yet, but I think we can close the nominations for "Worst Trial Metric of the Year".  The hands-down wi...

Following up on yesterday's post regarding a study of placebo-related information, it seems worthwhile to pause and expand on the diffe...

4 out of 5 non-doctors recommend starting with "regular strength", and titrating up from there... (Photo from inventedbyamother....

I don’t think this qualifies yet as a trend, but two disturbing announcements came right back to back last week: First: As you’ve probably h...

“ Russia’s Clinical Trials are a Thriving Business ”, trumpeted the news release that came to my inbox the other day. Inside was a rather s...

The concept of “unrealistic optimism” among clinical trial participants has gotten a fair bit of press lately, mostly due to a small study ...

The authors of EDICT's white paper , in their executive summary, take a bleak view of the current state of clinical trial accrual: Of cr...