A search of Medline between 1993 and 1997 using keywords for cystic fibrosis turned up over 4300 articles. A doctor would have to read 16 or 17 articles a week to keep up with this volume of literature, and yet research has shown that doctors only have, at best, between half and one hour a week to spend on keeping up to date with the literature. Controlled Trials A way round this has been for journals to publish review articles. The traditional review article is usually commissioned by a journal of an expert in a particular field. This expert then reviews the available literature along with a commentary which reflects his or her opinion.
Research varies enormously in the quality of the studies performed.
In a RCT the researcher is trying to find out whether a new treatment is better than either no treatment, or a recognised treatment for a particular condition. However we know that certain things can influence the outcome of trials of treatment. If the doctor is allowed to select the patients to go into each group, then they are unlikely to be comparable, and differences between the treatments will not be due to the treatment, but differences in the patients themselves. If a patient receives any kind of treatment, even an inactive pill or placebo, we know that they will get better so testing treatment against nothing is likely to result in an improvement in the treated group simply because of this placebo effect . Finally, if the person measuring the outcome of the trial knows what treatment the patient has had, they could bias the results of the trial in favour of the treatment that they prefer.