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Why give the control group a sugar pill?

A team is testing a new painkiller. Someone proposes the simplest design: give the drug to one group, give the other group nothing, and compare reported pain.

Explain why a good trial instead gives the control group an identical dummy pill, and why neither patients nor evaluators should know who got which.

Your answer

This one is open-ended. Work it through, then check your reasoning against the full solution.

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