ShmoopTube

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here's your shmoop du jour brought to you by aspirin. which you can

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thank for allowing your mother to survive your childhood. now come on clap. [mom frowns, kid yells]

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a researcher wants to know if aspirin can improve memory. in order to avoid

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experimenter bias the researcher has her assistant assigned participant to groups

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so that she doesn't know which participants are in the aspirin group

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and which are in the control group. the participants are also unaware of their

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group and some participants are given aspirin while others are given a placebo.

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what's this procedure known as? and here the people in charge double-blind phase

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1 through 3 and controlled .okay well let's start with all those clinical

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trial answers. or sure mom won't mind. the first stage or phase of a clinical trial

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is when a drug is first tested on humans. which doesn't sound all that safe ,but it

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is because numerous preclinical and phase zero tests come before it .in test

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tubes on animals and through human micro dosing. stage one comes when scientists

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are sure it's safe enough to test as normal doses, but it's also not at all [man peers over glasses at kids]

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with question described so we can cross out b. stage 2 comes after that. while

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stage 1 aims to test safety half-life and tolerability stage 2 is more focused

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on the biological changes caused by the drug. like does the drugs actually have a

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positive effect on the human body .an important stage in clinical trials, sure.

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but not at all to do with what our research was doing. this is followed by

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stage 3 which is focused on the efficacy of the drug within the context of a

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clinical practice this is the gold standard stage which occurs across large

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patient groups in order to see if the drug is ready for the medical market.

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only eighteen percent of drugs that make it to stage two get this far and this

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answer is zero percent of what we're looking for. but what about a controlled

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procedure? the actions of our researcher definitely fit into this answer because [scientist mixes solution]

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it simply describes a series of policies and procedures set in place to ensure

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quality control and accuracy with in a study. unfortunately it's not quite

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specific enough. this leaves us with a the correct answer a double-blind

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procedure describes when both the researcher and the participants are

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blind to which group the participants belong to. it ensures there's no bias on

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behalf of the researcher when making observations and also prevents

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participants from acting a certain way and skewing result. sounds exactly like

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the procedure described. unless you feel like making a bad pun. [kid lines up rats wearing sunglasses]

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