Double blind study
In fact, in many cases patients will see improvements even when they are not taking active medication. Yet this doesn’t simply mean that the treatment is effective. After taking the medication, the patient reports improvement in his or her condition. Let’s say that a physician prescribes a new medication to a patient. Identifying successful treatments is a complex procedure. While they are best known for their application in medicine, double-blinded studies are widely used to validate theories and ideas in many other fields including agriculture, biology, chemistry, engineering, forensics, and social sciences. They are often referred to as the gold standard for testing medications, that is, the most accurate test available. Double-blind studies are the very foundation of modern evidence-based medicine. In other words, the results of the research are less likely to be affected by external factors, such as the experimenters verbally or nonverbally communicating their assumptions about the treatment’s efficiency or the expectations of the participants.ĭouble-blind studies serve as an invaluable scientific method in the pharmaceutical industry trials where they are regularly used for determining the impact of new medications.
The main purpose of double-blind studies is to minimize the effects of experimenter bias.