Undercover with the gift from a dear friend :) I love you!
Aaaah, I was so close to starting my paper, but I had to do 5 simultaneous things in one day, all related to academia. A very wise dear friend once told me that if you succeed in doing one thing in a foreign country you can be very happy that day.. So I managed to find Physics Library, barrow a book and use the copier machine with my copy-card. Wow! Yes, then I will not torture myself about not starting the paper.. In 5 minutes the library is closing... Let me see if I can finish this post..
Then what are RCTs? Being one of the experimental/ intervention studies, they are conducted with subjects/patients that meet certain criteria in order to decide an outcome of an intervention. If you wanna know more then read the italic part, if not just skip it ;) Subjects that are intervened are distributed randomly to two groups, one being control and another treatment group; and in a given time with an adequate number of subjects, outcomes are collected and metaanalysis is done by statisticians and researcher. The analyzed intervention is applied to treatment group and usually placebo used for the control group. One of the most important aspects of RCTs is that they try to eliminate bias by blinding. They might only use placebos for eliminating bias for the participants as well as might use double blinding by also not informing the researchers about which intervention given to which group. There are also triple and quadruple blindings where in addition, study investigators and statisticians respectively are blinded.
Our doctors base their decisions mostly on meta-analysis of RCTs to prescribe us some drugs, to relieve our symptoms. They cannot tell us to do other things because they have to obey the rules of EBM. Do you ever remember going to a doctor with a cold infection and the doctor asking if you slept regularly for the last couple of days, or whether you are under stress due to your job/ school? Or if you have a troubling relationship with the significant other.. In general, they are not designated to find the cause of an illness, they are designated to relieve the symptoms. But is this curing? (Surgical removings put aside) Can all of us be treated with average approaches? Am I an individual with a history or an average person with an average height? Oh they do not care about this in EBM.. If you care you become "Alternative"!
Mechanical thinking govern our lives in every little bits and pieces...
So much about the EBM... How it will be connected to the time travel has to wait for another post.. This has already been a mechanical and a boring post :) And the beautiful song of "library closing" with the announce "Bitte beachten Sie .... :)" propagating right now..

