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But the modern age of the
placebo was really marked by its use in research in the past 70 or 80 years, and by the
seminal study by Henry Beecher of Harvard in 1955 who summarized 15 placebo controlled
trials including an aggregate of over 1000 individuals, and calculated the aggregate
benefit from placebo alone was about 35 percent. And that figure of about a one-third
improvement due to placebo became gospel in placebo trials in the past half-century. And
many of us who design studies assume that the placebo recipients can improve by a third,
and if our drug is going to do better, it has to be statistically significantly better
than one-third. |