Clinical equipoise

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Clinical equipoise, also known as the principle of equipoise, is the ethical principle that in medical research involving assigning patients to multiple different treatment arms, the clinician should have no reason to prefer any one arm over the others. In particular, in a randomized clinical trial, the clinician should not believe one treatment to be either superior or inferior to the others. In practice, if a medication known to be effective is being tested against a placebo control, in order to maintain clinical equipoise the medication in the treatment group may have to be reduced in dosage to below known effective doses.