I knew what blood pressure pill it was. That was a particular brand of pill. The only one I didn’t know, of course, was the, the cholesterol thing. And that was, because that was like a separate, it was like the two studies in one. You know, it was on the one hand you had the blood pressure test, on the other they wanted to see what result cholesterol lowering had. So that was, that was the one you didn’t know if you were on or not.
How did they do that? Did they have a, sort of a blank bottle or something, with no label on, or how--?
Yeah, yeah, you’re just taking the pill and you’re just marked up with the, the, you know, the actual name of the trial, ASCOT trial. And it didn’t say anything. You didn’t know if you were taking sugar or a cholesterol-lowering thing. You’re just taking a tablet for, you know, several years. And it was marked up, it was coded, each one was like coded with your, I suppose your own code number and the trial number. So eventually they could, they knew at the end of the trial what, who had been taking what, but not, not during the actual trial.
So did the doctors send you off to another room to get that from someone else? Or did they just take the coded bottle out of the cupboard?
They took it out of a cupboard. While you, when you went every six months to have your tests done, while you were there they gave you the next six months’ worth of pills. There was the cholesterol, you know, the dummy pill, or whatever it was in one box, and there was the, the actual cholesterol - the blood pressure tablet.
But they didn’t know which?
They, no - well, they said they didn’t anyway [laugh]. I trust, I take it they didn’t.
It was hinted about halfway through, it was hinted at that I was on the cholesterol anyway. Because the, although the doctor didn’t actually, he couldn’t really tell me, he said, “I don’t know what the...” you know, he didn’t know himself which one I was on. But he said, “Whatever it is, I would keep taking it. It seems to be doing you good” you know. I mean, my cholesterol came down from about over 6 to about 3½. Which is pretty reasonable, you know. So having been told that, it was obvious that, you know, I was on the cholesterol pill.
