Thank you for the invitation to respond to a letter received about our article titled “Time to reflect on open-label placebos and their value for clinical practice.”Letter authors Ballou and Kube disagree with some of our criticisms of currently available research on open-label placebos (OLPs). [...]
Although placebo-controlled trials are considered the gold standard for evaluating the efficacy of healthcare interventions, they can be perceived to be controversial and challenging to conduct for surgical treatments. The SUcceSS trial is the first placebo-controlled trial of lumbar decompression surgery for symptomatic lumbar canal [...]
This study found that improvements not caused by the surgery itself were mostly nonspecific effects other than placebo effects, suggesting that when surgical trials with nonoperative controls demonstrate no benefits, placebo-controlled studies may be redundant.
Placebos remain important for clinical trials because they help achieve blinding and, thus, control of bias; however, there is no evidence that placebos have much to offer for clinical care. When administered in a blinded fashion, a placebo will provide a small effect, but the [...]
