I think really it’s just; a trial is just a way of being very scientific about something. So it’s not about looking at hunches or perhaps a couple of people do one thing. I mean we’re all very prone to think because we know one person that this has happened to, that that’s, that’s what happens. And that’s not what happens. In order to, in order to make a recommendation as to what people should do, we have to have good evidence to, to say, “Well, this is what people do. This is what the average person does.” And we can only do that in an unbiased way by using trial data. And part of that is that the two different groups of people… have no other differences between them, other than one was randomised to something and one was randomised to something else. So I think the fact that you’ve got a group of people who are all starting off in the same place, and as large a group of people as possible, is really important. And that randomisation is just, like flipping a coin really. You have no choice in it. It’s just one thing or the other. And that’s, the most important part of the trial is that there is no choice. If there was a choice, it wouldn’t be a randomised trial. So...
Rachel explains what someone needs to know when starting in a medical study.
Erm, some terms that we use are blinded which means that you don’t know what treatment is, the patient’s having. There is single blinded where just the family don’t know, double blinded where the family and the researchers at site don’t know. Erm, randomised means where a patient is randomly allocated one arm of the treatment of the study or another. And there can be two arms to the treatment, there can be three arms, erm and they are randomly allocated. There are lots of different ways that they do that, it can either be done electronically or it can be done by sending a fax and someone not related to the study, here at site, randomises them and picks the next consecutive envelope, as simple as that or enters it onto a spreadsheet and it randomly allocates them.
Helena (a research nurse) explains the terms used in medical studies.