Outpatient use of a double-blind medication trial: a clinical example

It is often difficult to determine whether a patient's improvement following a trial of a new medication is based on pharmacologic or nonspecific factors. A chronic schizophrenic patient initially had a dramatic improvement in his behavior during an open trial of phenytoin, but a double-blind trial demonstrated that this was not a pharmacologic response. Such double-blind controlled trials can easily be carried out in outpatient settings.