Abstract
Medical training equips individuals to provide care, but not to do research. Most medical schools provide students with a taste of basic and clinical research concepts, but they don’t typically go into detail. However, doing good clinical research is not easy and has challenges that are not present in basic bench research. The presence of recognized and unrecognized bias, confounding, reverse causality, and random error can lead to unreliable results. When results are unreliable and can not be used to improve health care knowledge or delivery, such research can be considered unethical, because no risk is justified when the potential benefit is zero. This talk will review common sources of error in clinical research and provide some basic tips on how to avoid these pitfalls through good study design, data collection, and teamwork.
