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Re:'Remarkable' medical discovery for sepsis moves to next p... by carbocation on Saturday October 14, 2023 @03:02PM (#37883231)
> In a placebo trial, it’s very important that the placebo be statistically independent from the treatment group.

Statistical independence has nothing to do with our conversation, which is about designing an appropriate set of comparator groups to enable valid inference about the hypothesis.

I’m afraid I don’t have time to continue a discussion where we have to pretend that the authors - who have identified sodium as a confounder for their hypothesis - actually wanted to study sodium.

Re:'Remarkable' medical discovery for sepsis moves to next p... by 4death4 on Saturday October 14, 2023 @05:27PM (#37884418)
Statistic independence has everything to do with it. If your control and treatment groups are not independent, you can’t differentiate a case where both groups experience an effect vs. both groups experiencing no effect. Please explain how that would work in your experiment.