ABSTRACT

A clinical trial is a planned experiment in humans designed to assess the safety and/or efficacy of a treatment. The well-designed clinical trial should control for bias that can corrupt the interpretation of clinical data. Unfortunately, a great deal of medical practice is based on anecdotal clinical reports or poorly designed clinical studies. Much of the scientific dogma we read in textbooks is actually based on a retrospective review of inconclusive data obtained from a handful of patients. This is especially true of new therapeutic areas in medicine, where experience and published data are lacking.