WELCOME

The images above are representative of about a third of

Oct. 22, 2017 by Catherine Pope

The images above are representative of about a third of the vignette:

The study was prompted by a recent study in which subjects were asked to rate their own eye health. It was a follow-up study that, although it wasn't directly comparable to the original study, still included a large group of subjects. As with all follow-up studies, the data did not include those subjects who were blinded to the study but only had a single eye.

Because WebMD isn't a placebo trial, the results were analyzed only at the WebMD website. The patients who completed the study had a much lower chance of suffering from eye-related conditions than those who didn't. A similar study, conducted in 2013, found that only about half of patients who used WebMD reported having at least one eye injury and about half of them reported pain.

But Dr. Shen has come out against the idea of an eye-specific placebo trial. "It's not going to help the patients who didn't have eye injuries," he said. "There's not going to be a huge drop in the incidence of those injuries."

And a lot of people are just not familiar with a lot of this stuff. In fact, it's a very hard thing to quantify accurately. "The number of patients is much higher than the number of patients who reported the [blind] trial or had other eye injuries," said William A. Pomeroy, the chief scientist for the Cochrane Collaboration's Ophthalmology Division. "People have the right to know what they're getting into, but it's difficult to know what the results mean in terms of the quality of the outcome."

And some of the people who got the eye-specific placebo trials are often the ones to whom the results don't add up.