alt Hacker NewsAlso the ethically in blind studies, can't just let some random patients die just to prove that your drug works.
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gus_massa • last Thursday at 4:58 PM
When there is already a known treatment, the control group gets the old known treatment and the other group get the new proposed treatment.
So the comparison is between old and new, to ensure the new treatment is better than the current standard one.
Yes, you can. The problem with testing is that a candidate treatment may make things worse for patients, not that it may improve things.
If your treatment works, that’s an improvement of what you had before. Once you know that, you can treat all patients. For some, that will be too late, but without your tests, it would be too late for them, too.
If your treatment doesn’t do anything at all, it keeps things the same, but the patients in the test group likely will have had some inconveniences (having to visit a doctor, getting an injection, etc), so you shouldn’t do the test.
If your treatment makes things worse, you of course shouldn’t do the test.
Problem is that you typically only can only know in hindsight which of these applies.
So, you think carefully on whether a treatment could fall in category 3, and, if so, first do it on a group of patients who consent to be Guinea pigs and, often, are already terminally ill, as any negative outcomes will cause less harm to such patients.
Then, as soon as during the test your stats tell the drug does or doesn’t work, you stop the test and either treat all patients or stop treating the test subjects.