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Trial design Blind faith Trial designs can vary signifi cantly when it comes to how much knowledge the personnel
and participants involved have. But to what end does this serve? Furthermore, what’s required to ensure that both participants and researchers are unaware of which group has the active pharmaceutical and which has the dummy? Mae Losasso speaks to Professor Mike Clarke, director of the Northern Ireland Clinical Trials Unit at Queen’s University Belfast and Matthew Sydes, professor of clinical trials and methodology at UCL’s MRC Clinical Trials Unit, to learn which situations are best suited for a blinded trial, and how to go about doing so.
I
n the early 1780s, a pseudo-scientific fad gripped the Paris salons: Austrian doctor Franz Anton Mesmer had brought his theory of animal magnetism, or mesmerism as it would come to be known, to the French capital. Mesmer’s notion rested on the assumed existence of an invisible but powerful ‘universal fluid’, which if harnessed correctly could be ‘capable of curing immediately diseases of the nerves’. Standing in a wooden tub, holding an iron wand to the afflicted area, patients would swoon, convulse and shriek. Coming round, Mesmer’s disciples would find their nervous disorders miraculously cured.
While the rich and fashionable – including fellow Austrian-born queen, Marie Antoinette – flocked to Mesmer’s clinic, the medical establishment were up in arms. How much of this theory, they cried, was based on scientific truth? To appease both his queen and the scientific community, King Louis XVI appointed a study commission comprised of leading French astronomers, biologists and physicists of the day – as well as Benjamin Franklin, the then US ambassador to France and famed savant of magnetism and electricity. Observing Mesmer’s patients, the commission speculated that imagination might account for the
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Clinical Trials Insight /
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