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The Continuing Unethical Use of Placebo Controls
Abstract
Is it ethical to use a placebo? The answer to this question will depend, I suggest, upon whether there is already available an orthodox treatment of proved or accepted value. If there is such an orthodox treatment the question will hardly arise, for the doctor will wish to know whether a new treatment is more, or less, effective than the old, not that it is more effective than nothing.-- A. Bradford Hill1 Unaccountably, in these times of raised ethical consciousness, placebo treatments are still commonly used in medical research in circumstances in which their use is unethical. We refer . . .
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Citations
Cited by
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Bekelman, J. E., Li, Y., & Gross, C. P. (2003) · JAMA · doi:10.1001/jama.289.4.454 · Cited by 1,816
Placebo Response in Studies of Major Depression: Variable, Substantial, and Growing
Walsh, B. T., Seidman, S. N., Sysko, R., & Gould, M. (2002) · JAMA · doi:10.1001/jama.287.14.1840 · Cited by 1,109
Trials to assess equivalence: the importance of rigorous methods: Fig 1
Jones, B., Jarvis, P., Lewis, J. A., & Ebbutt, A. F. (1996) · BMJ · doi:10.1136/bmj.313.7048.36 · Cited by 1,032
Temple, R., & Ellenberg, S. S. (2000) · Annals of Internal Medicine · doi:10.7326/0003-4819-133-6-200009190-00014 · Cited by 871
Metadata
- Authors
- Rothman, K. J., & Michels, K. B.
- Venue
- New England Journal of Medicine
- Publisher
- Massachusetts Medical Society
- Published
- 1994-08-11
- Volume
- 331
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 394-398
- ISSN
- 0028-4793 (ISSN-L)
- 1533-4406
- OpenAlex
- W2312621854
- Cited by
- 663
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 51.77
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Continuing Unethical Use of Placebo Controls. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1056/nejm199408113310611
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- Rothman, K. J., & Michels, K. B. (1994). The Continuing Unethical Use of Placebo Controls. New England Journal of Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejm199408113310611
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
