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Blinding in pharmacological trials: the devil is in the details
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  • Published on: 13 November 2013
    Re:Writing a scientific paper: devil is in the details
    • Mandy Wan
    • Other Contributors:
      • Mine Orlu-Gul, Helene Legay, and Catherine Tuleu

    We thank Dr Hemila for sharing his work on Vitamin C with us. Dr Hemila draws our attention to his analysis of the work by Karlowski et al., which we read with interest. We are certainly in agreement with Dr Hemila that "technically the Karlowski study is not among the best" with regards to blinding.

    In our paper, the referenced Karlowski article was an example of how inadequate blinding can lead to questions...

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    Conflict of Interest:
    None declared.
  • Published on: 4 November 2013
    Writing a scientific paper: devil is in the details

    In their short review, Wan et al. refer to the Karlowski et al. (1975) study (1) as an example of problems caused by shortcomings in blinding. Karlowski et al. found that vitamin C significantly shortened the duration of colds; however, they proposed that the benefit of vitamin C was causd by the placebo effect (1).

    However, the placebo-effect explanation of Karlowski et al. was shown to be erroneous 2 decades a...

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    Conflict of Interest:
    None declared.