MICROBIO 160 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Managed Care, Institutional Review Board, Blind Experiment

• School: UMASS-Amherst
• Department: Microbiology
• Course: MICROBIO 160
• Professor: Steven Goodwin

Document Summary

Randomization tries to get at confounding factors, and blindness tries to get at biases. Essentially, a research study in human volunteers aiming to answer specific health questions. Immensely important to improving healthcare; only way to find and prove effective ways to improve health. Inclusion/exclusion criteria : medical or social standards that determine eligibility for entering a clinical trial. Cancer prevention trials enroll healthy people who are at high risk of developing cancer. Investigational group gets the new treatment being tested. Stratification : first categorizing subjects into subgroups by specific characteristics (e. g. gender) and then randomizing into control and investigational groups. Double blind randomized studies : neither doctor nor patient knows which is control and which is treatment. Placebo effect : if you think you"re in the new treatment group and going to get better, you might actually feel better. Patients receive at minimum the best standard treatment.