[troutman]

Originally Posted by Clutch

Troutman, how many medical treatments including drugs could survive RDBCT's? ( Randomized double blind controlled trials )

How many?

We should not endorse any treatments that don't survive RDBCTs.

I recommend again Snake Oil Science, which contains an excellent description of how proper medical research should be done.

http://www.skepdic.com/refuge/bausell.html

Many members of the CAM research community and the general public, as well as many members of the press, don't understand the importance of double-blind, randomized clinical trials that employ placebo groups and have low attrition rates. (Some studies present a false sense of success only because they don't mention that, for example, 60% of those getting acupuncture to cure their heroin addiction, dropped out of the study before it was completed. Guess who dropped out and who stayed in the study, and guess what that can make the data look like if the attrition rate isn't mentioned.) Many people don't appreciate the importance of having a large number of participants in a clinical trial (at least 25 should be in each group, according to Bausell). Many also think there's no difference between peer reviewed journals. They rank a study in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, the Journal of Noetic Sciences, or the Journal of the Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine as high as they would an article in Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association or the New England Journal of Medicine. According to Bausell, many CAM practitioners or researchers, as well as many of their clients, think biased personal experience trumps an unbiased scientific study. Bausell makes it clear, however, that bias is a problem for all medical researchers and isn't restricted to just CAM researchers.

The scientific evidence strongly indicates that most of the relief from CAM and a good deal of the relief from scientific medicine, is coming from the placebo effect. Bausell focuses on CAM but we should not forget that much of what he says will apply equally well to scientific medical research as well.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=4

So how can we decide which studies are credible? We now have published guidelines such as the 22 item Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) checklist to assess the quality of randomized controlled trials, but Bausell offers some simpler criteria that can rule out the worst offenders:

• Subjects are randomly assigned to a CAM therapy or a credible placebo
• At least 50 subjects per group
• Less than 25% dropout rate
• Publication in a high-quality, prestigious, peer-reviewed journal