Medical Research

In conducting research we need to begin with what is known, then what needs to be known and finally what can be known. We need too to allocate resources to answering the questions that would provide the greatest gains.

 

The larger proportion of clinical research is without clinical utility and the clinically useful tends to be actuarially so rather than allowing clinicians to answer specific questions related to specific patients at the bedside. The few nuggets to be found lie in a morass of the unintelligible and the useless.

 

There is very little evidence for anything and a great deal of research simply ends with a defined need for a well designed blinded randomised control trial. We do not have the resources for well designed blinded randomised control trials; we need to find some other way to answer the questions that need answering.