Clinical researchers have long claimed that patients who enter clinical trials are better off medically than those who don’t. I’m open to the notion that patients might derive personal meaning from trial participation, but I’ve always been dubious of the suggestion that trial participation in itself is therapeutically beneficial–above and beyond drugs received– in part… Continue reading Finding Skew: Informed Consent and Bias in Clinical Trials
Tag: bias
STAIRing at Method in Preclinical Studies
Medical research, we all know, is highly prone to bias. Researchers are, after all, human in their tendencies to mix desire with assessment. So too are trial participants. Since the late 1950s, epidemiologists have introduced a number of practices to clinical research designed to reduce or eliminate sources of bias, including randomization of patients, masking… Continue reading STAIRing at Method in Preclinical Studies