When reading the report of a clinical study in a medical journal, the typical question
an overly busy clinician-reader asks is the following: do the results convince me
and are they valid? In the era of evidence based medicine, the randomised clinical
trial has become the reference-standard of all designs, when assessing the efficacy
of a certain treatment or predefined diagnostic handling. This is because the comparison
is based on random allocation of patients to the experimental arm or control arm of
the trial, thereby preventing confounding by indication. Other mechanisms to further
enhance the internal validity of randomized studies are concealment of allocation
and blinding.
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: January 28, 2020
Accepted:
January 21,
2020
Received:
January 12,
2020
Identification
Copyright
© 2020 European Federation of Internal Medicine. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
