The next crucial question is: how do you apply what you have learnt? Let's imagine for a moment that you've read a report about a new clinical trial and all the signs appear encouraging: its results confirm conclusions drawn from similar trials and the experts seem to agree that it has been well designed and has generated valid information. Now comes the difficult part: how can you use these new findings to improve your own health?
None of us wants to become a medical researcher, but it does help to know a little bit about the various types of medical research as well as their limits.
Basically, medical studies can belong to three categories: - Laboratory experiments.
- Epidemiological research.
- Clinical trials.
Laboratory experiments can be carried out in test tubes or on animals such as mice, rabbits or guinea pigs. Results obtained from animal trials should never be applied directly to humans for several reasons. For starters, of course, people are not lab animals. Also, mice and other small creatures are not naturally subject to many of the common ailments that afflict humans; therefore, scientists have to alter them genetically or physiologically to create animal ‘models’ for human diseases. The results of such studies are interesting and useful to scientists, and often pave the way for important advances, but they don’t tell doctors which medicines to prescribe for people. In epidemiological research; scientists closely study a large group of people and then collate their findings. Next, they extrapolate these findings to the general population. Because such a study is observational, it is a fairly useful method to uncover possible risk factors but it can never actually prove a cause-and-effect relation, because the interactions between humans and the environment are extremely complex. In contrast to epidemiological studies, which scrutinize the complexity of real-life cases, clinical trials provide a systematic way of testing the effects of one particular factor, such as a drug, under tightly controlled circumstances. Clinical trials, which are experiments performed on people, are thus the most reliable of the three categories, because they compare two carefully controlled groups of people. However, remember that these trials have their own limitations as well.
