> Exit poll: 95% correctly guessed which group they were assigned to. [ie, knew they had taken XTC or not]
This pins the WTF meter. 1 out of the 20 could not figure it out?
In related info: The controlled studies for viagra were a bit comical.
This pins the WTF meter. 1 out of the 20 could not figure it out?
In related info: The controlled studies for viagra were a bit comical.
This is discussed in more detail in Irving Kirsch's The Emperor's New Drugs.
Antidepressants tend to be long lasting and slow acting (AFAICT) which MDMA is not.
Regarding the issue of whether or not it is poor blinding, I guess it is a bit like the tree falling in the forest but nobody is around to hear it: if you conduct a placebo-controlled study, but all the participants can correctly guess which group they're in, is it really a placebo-controlled study?
I guess (as may have been suggested elsewhere) you could use a non-seratonergic stimulant of some sort to give people the feeling that they are on something, and rely on them not being able to tell what it is. You'd need to screen for anyone that had any recreational experience though.
Speed would probably work. One thing that interests me though is whether or not the patients were treated seperately. Having been surrounded by people on MDMA while not partaking myself, at least in my anecdotal experience it can affect your state of mind, which could be one reason for the rather large placebo effects (given that the treatment is so obvious, one would expect placebo effects to be artificially lowered.
No, it's not, and the question of how many allegedly double-blind studies are compromised by this leakage deserves a lot more attention.
Suggestion is a powerful thing to some folks.