Tongkat-ali is not a Placebo

Tongkat-ali is not a Placebo

Placebo-controlled: A term used to describe a method of research in which an inactive substance (a placebo) is given to one group of participants, while the treatment (usually a drug or vaccine) being tested is given to another group. The results obtained in the two groups are then compared to see if the investigational treatment is more effective than the placebo.

Placebo-controlled studies are a way of testing a medical therapy in which, in addition to a group of subjects that receives the treatment to be evaluated, a separate control group receives a sham "placebo" treatment which is specifically designed to have no real effect. Placebos are most commonly used in blinded trials, where subjects do not know whether they are receiving real or placebo treatment. Often, there is also a further "natural history" group that does not receive any treatment at all.

The purpose of the placebo group is to account for the placebo effect, that is, effects from treatment that do not depend on the treatment itself. Such factors include knowing one is receiving a treatment, attention from health care professionals, and the expectations of a treatment's effectiveness by those running the research study. Without a placebo group to compare against, it is not possible to know whether the treatment itself had any effect.

Patients frequently show improvement even when given a sham or "fake" treatment. Such intentionally inert placebo treatments can take many forms, such as a pill containing only sugar, a surgery where nothing efficacious is actually done (just an incision and sometimes some minor touching or handling of the underlying structures), or a medical device (such as an ultrasound machine) that is not actually turned on. Also, due to the body's natural healing ability and statistical effects such as regression to the mean, many patients will get better even when given no treatment at all. Thus, the relevant question when assessing a treatment is not "does the treatment work?" but "does the treatment work better than a placebo treatment, or no treatment at all?" As one early clinical trial researcher wrote, "the first object of a therapeutic trial is to discover whether the patients who receive the treatment under investigation are cured more rapidly, more completely or more frequently, than they would have been without it."^[1]p.195 More broadly, the aim of a clinical trial is to determine what treatments, delivered in what circumstances, to which patients, in what conditions, are the most effective.^[2][3]

Therefore, the use of placebos is a standard control component of most clinical trials, which attempt to make some sort of quantitative assessment of the efficacy of medicinal drugs or treatments. Such a test or clinical trial is called a placebo-controlled study, and its control is of the negative type. A study whose control is a previously tested treatment, rather than no treatment, is called a positive-control study, because its control is of the positive type.

Government regulatory agencies approve new drugs only after tests establish not only that patients respond to them, but also that their effect is greater than that of a placebo (by way of affecting more patients, by affecting responders more strongly, or both). As a result, "placebo-controlled studies often are designed in such a way that disadvantages the placebo condition".^[4]

Tongkat-ali is not a Placebo as i clinically proven in 2003 by the British Journal of Sports Medicine

 British Journal of Sports Medicine 2003 THE ERGOGENIC EFFECTS OF EURYCOMA LONGIFOLIA JACK: A PILOT STUDY Eurycoma longifolia Jack (ELJ), which contains quassinoids such as eurycomalacton, eurycomanon, and eurycomanol, has been reported to have aphrodisiac properties and to increase testosterone levels in men. Previous studies have established that the testosterone supplementation increases fat free mass, muscle strength, and muscle mass, which are important for physical function and athletic performance. {…}. The treatment produced 2.92% greater reduction in electrical activity of the muscle measured at the end of the experiment compared with placebo. The mean arm circumference of the treatment group increased significantly by 1.8 cm after the supplementation, from 30.87 (1.88) to 32.67 (1.96) cm (p = 0.011), but there was no significant increase in the placebo group. The results suggest that water soluble extract of Eurycoma longifolia Jack increased fat free mass, reduced body fat, and increased muscle strength and size, and thus may have an ergogenic effect. Further investigations are warranted. Sexual enhancement pills