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Comment by tim-projects | Hacker News Reader

I'd argue that the results might not be from the drugs but from the fact that they were heavily monitored by other humans.

It's not the drugs that people with high anxiety need, it's people giving them attention and caring for them.

These experiments need a control where they just take the drug and they don't have medical staff around.

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Isn't that basically the same as them using a placebo? If just care has the same effect, then surely heavily monitoring them while providing a placebo drug should work.

The problem is you can very obviously tell that you have a placebo because nothing is happening. Some studies mitigate that issue by giving a microdose but then maybe only the microsose is necessary? It seems like a hard problem

Such studies typically use an active placebo, such as methylphenidate.

But that doesn't test if the LSD helps in a non-clinical setting, only that the monitoring and attention helps

This is exactly what the placebo is for. Same attention and care, no drug.

The control is where you have the medical staff around but not the drug. I believe placebo control groups are pretty common.

"In this phase 2b, multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of 4 dose levels of MM120 that included 198 adults with generalized anxiety disorder, the primary outcome of a dose-response relationship for change in Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale score at week 4 was statistically significant."

You are fabricating a lot of details about the study to come to that conclusion.

If only there were experts on the ground, designing the experiment, who could plan to avoid such interfering variables.

That's why we have placebos ... and double-blind studies ...

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