randomized controlled trial
oracknows | June 26, 2016One of the most frequent complaints about evidence-based medicine (EBM), in contrast to science-based medicine (SBM), is its elevation of the randomized clinical trial as the be-all and end-all for clinical evidence for an intervention for a particular disease or condition. Unknown but enormous quantities of "digital ink" have been spilled explaining this distinction right here on this blog, and I tened to like to refer to this aspect of EBM as "methodolatry," a term I originally learned from another ScienceBlogs blogger (now moved on) and defined as profane worship of the randomized…
sgorman | September 16, 2015As most people in any empirical or scientific field know, the gold standard for experimenting and establishing causality is the randomized controlled trial (RCT). In an RCT, subjects are randomly assigned to one of two conditions: an experimental group or a control group. The experimental group receives the intervention or drug and the control group receives standard care or a placebo (basically, the equivalent of the status quo). The idea behind the randomized controlled trial is to control the circumstances surrounding the experimental question as much as possible. This allows researchers…