Skip Navigation

This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in ISI Web of Science
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Milton, J.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Milton, J.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

International Journal of Epidemiology 2003;32:943-944
© International Epidemiological Association 2003

Symposium

Spies, magicians, and Enid Blyton: how they can help improve clinical trials

Julie Milton

Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, Canynge Hall, Whiteladies Road, Bristol BS8 2PR, UK. E-mail: j.milton@bristol.ac.uk

Keywords Random allocation, randomized controlled trials/st[Standards]

Accepted 30 June 2003

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

Some of the most important methods for preventing bias in modern clinical trials have a peculiar history. Masked assessment with placebo control seems to have appeared first during tests led by Benjamin Franklin in 1784 to investigate unorthodox claims of healing by ‘animal magnetism’ or ‘mesmerism’. People were blindfolded and told that they were or were not receiving magnetism, when the reverse was true, and were given sham treatments of ‘mesmerised water’.1 Similar methods were used to test claims of ‘higher’ mesmeric phenomena such as thought-reading and precognition.2 Two-hundred years later, the same methodology is still used to assess controversial claims in parapsychology, a subdiscipline of experimental psychology, that uses controlled laboratory techniques to examine claims of psychic abilities. Recent problems noted with the conduct of clinical trials suggest that although the two fields have . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Problems with allocation concealment
 

   Spies, magicians, and envelopes
 

   Conclusions
 

Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?