Clinical Research 101: Lecture 2

 Editor ' s note: Only about 15 million people so far have gotten the new bivalent Covid booster that ' s specifically formulated against the Omega variants that are currently circulating. I got it a few days ago, Walgreen ' s was offering appointments the same day! I got the flu shot at the same time, both absolutely free. Do it!So, picking up where we left off, to determine whether an intervention is beneficial, harmful or basically useless you ordinarily need a comparison group. There are actually exceptions. You don ' t need a randomized controlled trial for parachutes when jumping out of airplanes because you already know what happens just about every time you jump out of an airplane without one. But few medical conditions are like that. Even ordinarily progressive conditions, such as cancer or multiple sclerosis, can spontaneously remit, at least temporarily, and anyway we might like to slow them down even if we can ' t cure them. But infectious diseases in particular are a battle between the pathogen and the immune system, and the immune system usually wins eventually. So you have to measure the difference between people who get eye of  newt and toe of frog, and those who don ' t.Unfortunately, it ' s not that simple. I can round up a bunch of people who have had Creeping Crud and compare the outcomes of those who have taken Eontof and those who haven ' t, but that ' s unlikely to prove anything. For starters, the two groups may have been different in all sor...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs