In clinical trials of new medicines, half of the subjects receive the drug being tested and half receive a physiologi...

shunhe on January 8, 2021

Hi @Isabel-Zuniga,

Thanks for the question! Note that this is a paradox question. (E) is wrong because it doesn’t matter if the participants know that there was a chance they’d get a placebo. They’d have to actually know they got one, not just participate in a trial where they had placebos.

(A) helps complete the explanation. If some side effects of the drug were known, and the experimenters could recognize the side effect, then they’d know who was taking the drug by looking at who was getting the side effects. And the point is that experimenters don’t know who gets the real drug, so it defeats the point.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.