revisiting the sham is it all smoke and mirrors回顾骗局是烟雾和镜子.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine Volume 2011, Article ID 842767, 4 pages doi:10.1093/ecam/neq074 Commentary Revisiting the Sham: Is It all Smoke and Mirrors? Brandon Horn,1, 2, 3, 4 Judith Balk,5 and Jeffrey I. Gold4, 6 1 Eastern Center for Complementary Medicine, PC, Los Angeles, California, USA 2 American University of Complementary Medicine, Los Angeles, California, USA 3 Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA 4 Department of Anesthesiology Critical Care Medicine, Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA 5 Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California, USA 6 Departments of Anesthesiology and Pediatrics, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Brandon Horn, bhorn@ Received 10 January 2010; Accepted 25 May 2010 Copyright © 2011 Brandon Horn et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The misuse of sham controls in examining the efficacy or effectiveness of Complementary and Alternative Medicine has created numerous problems. The theoretical justification for incorporating a sham is questionable. The sham does not improve our control of bias and leads to relativistic data that, in most instances, has no appropriate interpretation with regards to treatment efficacy. Even the concept of a sham or placebo control in an efficacy trial is inherently paradoxical. Therefore, it is prudent to re-examine