Promising results from an initial clinical trial show that sodium ascorbate – a pH-balanced formulation of vitamin C – is effective in treating sepsis.
I wouldn’t lose to much sleep in this one though. There’s been a string of many failed vitamin c trials that were much more rigorous than this.
To more seriously answer your question, there are platform trials, like in the ALS Healey trial, where a single control group can be used as a comparison for many different treatments, reducing the odds of being in a placebo group.
Ultimately we don’t know if thess experimental treatments work, otherwise they’d already be prescribed. Most drugs fail. And being in the placebo group would shield you from risks that end up being found in the treatment group. The placebo group may in many cases end up better off in the end. So even being in a treatment group shouldn’t really be approached imo like you’re getting “early access” to a treatment, because we don’t know if it’s a treatment yet. I don’t mean to discourage patients from helping in research, but it’s better to look at it mainly as a service that patient is doing for the for the community affected by that disease as a whole and for the researchers.
If these drugs aren’t rigorously studied we can sometimes end up with even bigger problems for patients down the road. A drug that gets approved on the basis of flimsy data is going to be much more difficult to study further after it gets approved. And now patients and doctors don’t have much information to help them tell if the drug is worth it or not, potentially exposing tons of people to unnecessary side effects or financial costs for something of questionable effectiveness.
I wouldn’t lose to much sleep in this one though. There’s been a string of many failed vitamin c trials that were much more rigorous than this.
To more seriously answer your question, there are platform trials, like in the ALS Healey trial, where a single control group can be used as a comparison for many different treatments, reducing the odds of being in a placebo group.
Ultimately we don’t know if thess experimental treatments work, otherwise they’d already be prescribed. Most drugs fail. And being in the placebo group would shield you from risks that end up being found in the treatment group. The placebo group may in many cases end up better off in the end. So even being in a treatment group shouldn’t really be approached imo like you’re getting “early access” to a treatment, because we don’t know if it’s a treatment yet. I don’t mean to discourage patients from helping in research, but it’s better to look at it mainly as a service that patient is doing for the for the community affected by that disease as a whole and for the researchers.
If these drugs aren’t rigorously studied we can sometimes end up with even bigger problems for patients down the road. A drug that gets approved on the basis of flimsy data is going to be much more difficult to study further after it gets approved. And now patients and doctors don’t have much information to help them tell if the drug is worth it or not, potentially exposing tons of people to unnecessary side effects or financial costs for something of questionable effectiveness.