[itsahoot]

That’s not the point of this. There have been signs from reputable doctors that this could provide help and relief for desperate cases, and that’s why it’s being allowed. That’s all.

Proven for him is a double blind study where they deliberately withhold a possible cure from dying patients in order to prove that the ones that got real treatment are still alive because of the real medicine vs placebo.

In my estimation a double study is nothing more than cruel and inhuman treatment of real patients who are dying. Treat them anyway if hey live then maybe you have a real cure, if they don't live then keep looking. The fact that they don't die should be proof enough.

[William Tell]

Proven for him is a double blind study where they deliberately withhold a possible cure from dying patients in order to prove that the ones that got real treatment are still alive because of the real medicine vs placebo."

I've heard of many studies that have been halted because the early data indicated clearly that the control group would suffer unduly for lack of the treatment.

My understanding is that the designers of the study typically decide as part of the initiation of the study what criteria would be used to cut the study short.

My wife was interviewed recently for inclusion in a cancer treatment study. The study would have consisted of adding a single drug to what was otherwise the standard treatment. Some of the control group were going to die. Some of the treated group were, no doubt, going to die.

Optimizing treatment when the difference between good treatment and better treatment is small requires discipline and sacrifice on the part of the doctors and the patients.

Twenty years ago people would have considered a "cure" for cancer to be a miracle. I heard a statistic recently that the survival rates for cancer had improved by 29% in the last twenty years. In effect, we have been the beneficiaries of one-third of a miracle in the last two decades. I'm one of the survivors and I appreciate the incredibly expensive drug that has contributed to this mini-miracle.

[freeandfreezing]

The French study is not a true double blind study. The control group was drawn from patients who were excluded due to other medical reasons, and patients from another facility where they were not offered the therapy.

Clearly in an emergency situation it makes sense to shift the testing rules to avoid withholding treatment from patients. Also, the doctors doing the research used an objective test of the drugs efficacy, actual viral load measurement, which allows determination of effectiveness with smaller populations.

As an example, for some other kinds of drugs it is difficult to determine effectiveness without a large and carefully controlled test population due to the difficulty in measuring the outcome. Consider the problem of measuring the effectiveness of an anti-depressant, where the patients feelings are what needs to be measured.