The Pros And Cons Of Randomized Controlled Trials

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are considered as the best research design for decisions about the effect of different interventions but randomization does not apply to many clinical issues related to real world setting. The current scenario of clinical research indicates some major challenges associated with traditional clinical trials and patient care. The foremost challenges being most researchers consider RCTs as the mainstay of clinical research, which instead are slow and expensive. They rarely produce findings, which can be easily adopted into routine clinical practice. The second challenge is that traditional trials are not relevant to routine clinical practice. This is because traditional RCTs determine the effectiveness of treatments delivered to carefully selected populations under ideal conditions. As a result, this creates difficulties in translating the results to the real world. The third challenge is the evidence paradox, which shows that although hundreds of RCTs have been performed so
PCTs help in identifying the diverse populations receiving care in real-world settings using broadly inclusive criteria for study participation. PCTs engage physicians and patients in implementation of study design, data collection, result interpretation, and in understanding the findings of the trial. The results obtained helps administrators, providers, patients, and policymakers in drawing meaningful conclusions. In addition, PCTs have less participant exclusion as compared to traditional RCTs, which in turn leads to the assessment for larger subset of participants. Traditional RCTs follow very tight control of sample, which makes difficult to generalize results whereas pragmatic study produces much more generalizable results because of larger sample