There is a meeting going on now to discuss ways to test whether experimental Ebola treatments actually work while also balancing that with trying to provide hope and care to severely sick patients.

The greater the public perception that something might work, regardless of the lack of evidence to back that up, the more ethically difficult it becomes for scientists to withhold it and give someone a placebo instead in their search for finding how effective that treatment is. In the case of highly lethal diseases with few or no treatment options, that conflict is magnified.

With time and enough data, a scientific consensus can often be reached on the effectiveness of a given treatment without using the gold standard method of a placebo-controlled clinical trial, but that process takes longer and the results are less definitive.