46) Fizz Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company, has developed a new pain relief

Question

46) Fizz Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company, has developed a new pain relief medication. Sixty patients suffering from arthritis and needing pain relief are available. Each patient will be treated and asked an hour later, "About what percent of pain relief did you experience?"

a) Why should Fizz not simply administer the new drug and record the patients' responses?

b) Outline the design of an experiment to compare the drug's effectiveness with that of aspirin and of a placebo.

c) Should patients be told which drug they are receiving? How would this knowledge probably affect their reactions?

d) If patients are not told which treatment they are receiving, the experiment is single-blind. Should this experiment be double-blind? Explain.

Explanation / Answer

1) I would recommend a placebo or another drug to compare it with. 2) Give 20 the real drug, 20 asprin, and the remaining 20 a placebo. 3) Ethically you should tell them, but not til after the experiment if you want desirable results. 4) Not necessarily. If person running the experiment doesn't know what he/she distributes to say person 1, how will he/she be able to categorize the results? In my opinion, I would just keep it single blind.

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