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bioethics

The invention of the randomised controlled trial

Testing new medicines on people randomly assigned to either treatments or controls is the gold standard in modern medicine. Such trials are the closest approximation to the controlled, experimental methods that biologists use in the laboratory. Medical historian Carsten Timmermann explains that their development started in the 1940s, when a new antibiotic was tested for the treatment of tuberculosis

Antibiotics Tuberculosis Clinical trial Microbiology Epidemiology Medical history

We all want our medicine to be based on evidence. But not all evidence is equal. The pioneers of evidence-based medicine were suspicious of personal experiences of doctors, or even series of systematic observations recorded by clinical researchers. They thought these were unreliable, and susceptible to all sorts of bias. Let’s examine why.

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What the (Tasmanian) devil is going on?

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Hidden underground networks

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