Why placebo is given in a medical research study for a new medicine?

Question

Could you tell me the reason for giving placebo in a medical research study for a new medicine, which looks and tastes like the actual medicine. When the researchers know, it will not cure the disease, why this is given to patients?

What is the scientific reason behind doing this?

Answer 1

The reason for giving placebos is that many people will feel better after they take a pill even if that pill doesn't have any biological effect. If a researcher is testing a pain pill and finds out that 20% of people taking the pain pill feel better, but 20% of the people taking the placebo also feel better, the new pain pill probably isn't effective. But if 20% of the people taking the placebo feel better and 80% of the people taking the pain pill feel better than the placebo is probably helping a lot of them.

In come research it would be unethical to use a placebo. For instance, if people have diabetes or high blood pressure, it would risk their health to stop their regular medications and give them only a placebo. In those cases, one group is treated with the test medication and one group is treated with "standard care." If people do as well or better on the test medication as standard care, then it's considered effective.

Answer 2

Because of the placibo effect. If I dress as a doctor and give a group of people a sugar pill when the complain of a problem, a certain number of them will get well without any other treatment. This may be due to mind over matter, the body's natural defenses, the illness playing out over time or other factors.
If I then give some people medicine that I hope will cure the problem, it it performs better than the placebo effect, then it has promise. If it performs the same or worse then it is a useless (and maybe expensive) item.
The effect is the reason that anecdotal reports of "cures" are useless until tested. If a hundred people hear of a cure and try it and due to placebo effect results in 20 people getting well, who are you going to hear from: the 20 or the 80 who got no help? And when you hear 20 reports of success, how do you have any idea that there were 80 for whom it failed.
The placebo effect is so strong that double blind studies are even more valid - a doctor giving out a pill known to the doctor to be a sugar pill will get poorer results, presumably because of subtle clues given the patient and interpretation of reports, than a doctor who doesn't know which patients are getting the sugar pill and which the medicine.

Answer 3

The reason for using a placebo control is that the benefits from taking medications are not always due to the drug itself. These benefits are called “placebo effects.” An example is when an investigator’s enthusiasm about a new medication sometimes influences the patient’s response.
A researcher must be able to separate placebo effects from the actual effects of the drug being studied. When equal numbers of patients receive either a placebo or another standard drug that will help treat their symptoms, the researcher can better judge the actual effects of the drug being tested.

Answer 4

this is so that the researchers can give the patients (some) the real medicine and others the placebo to see what they will act like, if there are any results, or is it has no effect at all.

The placebo people are the control group and the real medicine are the people being studied.

Answer 5

When doing research one needs to know if the real thing works. One way is to make the placebo look and taste the same but see if there are different reactions between the two. Hopefully, the real medicine will have a more dramatic improvement, in which case they can apply to the FDA for approval. As the placebo is mostly a sugar pill, there should be no improvement pharmacologically, but can be psychologically.

Answer 6

Giving a placebo is the only way to determine the effectiveness of the actual medication being tested.

People who participate in these studies know that they may receive the placebo and may not be helped.

Answer 7

The reason for this is to assess the body's natural ability to cure it's own ailment. Placebos can have the same effect on the human body as the medication in some cases. If the placebo performs as well as the medication, then the researchers know that they must reformulate it.

Answer 8

It's test for the actual medicine. The medicine might only work as often as the placebo or it might work so many times more often than the placebo. It;'s strange to think of it but the human mind is capable of great miracles as long as it believes it can happen.
The mind has a great power to heal.

Good luck

Answer 9

because so much of what medication does for us in our heads, the patient doesn't know what they get but the researchers know who got the new drug and who got the placebo, and they can see what side effects are caused be the drug instead of the patients imagination, and how well it performs compared to patients who think they took it.

Answer 10

BY GIVING PLACEBO`S TO PATIENTS, WHO DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE GETTING, ONLY THE RESEARCHERS DO, IT HAS BEEN PROVEN MANY TIMES OVER THAT THE PATIENT BELIEVES HE IS GETTING THE REAL DRUG, AND JUST BY BELIEVING IT,( POSITIVE ATTITUDE) THE PATIENT FULLY RECOVERS. AND WHILE AT THE SAME TIME PATIENTS RECEIVING THE REAL DRUG, BELIEVE THEY ARE GETTING THE PLACEBO, AND BECAUSE OF THE NEGATIVE ATTITUDE, THEY DO NOT RECOVER.