Coming to terms with randomisation

Hugh Laurie as House (Source: Wikipedia)

In my previous post I wrote a bit about RCTs and how they help us to know what does and doesn’t work. This is a very powerful tool for finding out what works but it requires a lot of effort in paperwork, analysis, recruiting participants and controls and in monitoring them. What’s nice is that this effort isn’t always needed. There are times when you can do RCTs with almost no effort and still learn a great deal. The problem is that there can be reluctance to do so.

The inspiration from this is drawn from chapter 5 of Bad Pharma, so if you want more details then you should go read them there.