Current medical research and opinion
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Publication-associated plain language summaries are brief, jargon-free summaries of scientific publications. They are intended for a broad, non-expert audience to help maximize the accessibility of the publication. Plain language summaries are typically found alongside peer-reviewed publications or in supplementary materials and can be indexed in PubMed. In this narrative commentary, we present the perspectives of five day-to-day users of plain language summaries from different stakeholder groups, gained through semi-structured qualitative interviews about the users' experiences with and opinions of plain language summaries.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Limitations of randomized, controlled, double-blinded studies in determining safety and effectiveness of treatments.
Randomized, controlled, double-blinded studies, in which treated subjects are randomly selected from the same pool as controlled (untreated) ones and neither the caregiver nor the patient knows which is which, are widely accepted as the gold standard of experimental medicine. There are well-documented advantages of such studies. ⋯ Some limitations of them are widely known and taught, such as inadequate sample size, failure of proper randomization, et cetera; others are less well-known. We shall focus on the latter.