• lime!@feddit.nu
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    2 days ago

    so how do you choose which humans to experiment on? bearing in mind that any sort of incentive will automatically select for a particular subset, and randomness will “obviously” need to exclude a particular subset

    • bryndos@fedia.io
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      2 days ago

      A researcher should offer a sufficient compensation package to get enough volunteers after explaining the risks. They should get independent medical advice too.

      They can still randomize within the volunteers with treatment / placebo, and maybe use quotas, but they’d just have to extend their trial period until they’d achieved a measurably representative treatment and control group and enough volunteers to test the hypothesis to the required level.

      This type of non-random sampling may very well have to be done anyway, for example if they needed the power to test efficacy and safety in all the potential dug interactions or co-morbidity scenarios. Not to mention any diagnosis requirement will also screen the sample which could be influenced by health care system resources and policies, not necessarily pure morbidity. So I think they can deal with non-random sampling in med research perfectly well.