Clinical trials are one of those things that have always seemed self-evident to me. Obviously, if you want to figure out whether a drug works, you should do a big experiment where consenting subjects are blind to whether they're getting a placebo or the actual drug, and then see how it affects them, duh! But I talked to historian David Jones about the history of clinical trials and learned that getting to this point has been a bumpy road, and there are still a lot of questions that scientists and doctors are trying to figure out.
Listen to this episode if you want to learn
- how a French commission set up a placebo to test the effectiveness of exorcisms
- why surgery is so hard to do clinical trials for
- how clinical trials have become an industry in their own right
