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Double Blinding
and TMD
Double blinding, or
more specifically, masking both the patient and the provider/observer
of that intervention that was given, has also been shown to be
important, and have a strong effect on the treatment outcome.
Ideally, neither the researcher-observer, treating clinician,
patient, nor the statistician should know which treatment group
a person was assigned.
Double-blind designs
lend themselves well to drug studies in which identically packaged
active drugs or substances are compared to inactive or placebo
ingredients.
With TMD research,
blinding can be problematic, since many of the interventions are
not medications, and thus are not easy to mask or blind. If the
study is about testing for the efficacy of occlusal splints, and
the subject is not given one, it is difficult to mask this from
the person providing treatment and the subject (Dao
et al., 1994).
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