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> It sounds to me like these guys are demanding citations for double-blind
> human trials of antioxidants in diving.
> 
> The way I learned it, somewhere, such a trial would involve several groups
> of divers, all in comparable physical condition, including a control group.
>  The control group gets no antioxidants at all, the other group gets
> varying doses of varying things.  The real test comes when you start diving
> them; you have to first find the depth and oxygen exposure that puts 50% of
> the control group into O2 tox convulsions, and hope you don't kill anyone
> in the process, and then you run the other groups through the same exposure
> and count the number of divers who convulse.
> 
> Medical research ethics suggests that we are probably not going to do this
> experiment any time soon.

That is right.  That is not the experiment to do.  Since such situations
come up in medical research when testing new drugs other methods can be
used which are more ethical.  First of all the control group would not
take a placebo but would be given the most effective standard treatment.
This is because you do not want see if a new treatment is better than
nothing.  You want to find out whether a new treatment is better than
the best treatment available.  You can then compare the risk of O2 tox
using epidemological statistical procedures such as logistic regression.
Confounding factors such as age and gender can be controled for to
an extent as long as your groups are reasonably balanced and large.

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