Placebo Effect for Meniere's Disease Sac Shunt Surgery Disputed

Endolymphatic Mastoid Shunt: A Reevaluation of Efficacy

“…By the χ 2 test, they reported no difference between the active and placebo groups. Arenberg 7 and Pillsbury et al 8 both argued that there was clearly an improvement in the active group when groups A and B were included as successes and C and D as failures. When success was collectively considered to be A, B, and C, the active group had 87% (13/15 patients) success and the placebo group 67% (10/15 patients).…”

Surgical interventions for Ménière’s disease

“…Ten studies were RCTs but did not compare an active intervention to no treatment or placebo (Bojrab 2018;Kitahara 2008 Two studies were critiques or re-analysis of the study Thomsen 1981 but did not report any primary data (Arenberg 1981;Welling 2000).…”

Treatment of vestibular disorders with weak asymmetric base-in prisms: An hypothesis with a focus on Ménière’s disease

“…The functional effect of betahistine, for example, has seriously been doubted, and its placebo effect, though not proven, made plausible [1]. Moreover, the same has been reported to hold for endolymphatic sac (or shunt) surgery [4,12,13,92,93,105]. Endolymphatic sac surgery, for example, has been shown to be as effective as a simple mastoidectomy, with 70% of the patients reporting alleviation of the Ménière symptoms in both groups [12,13].…”