Understanding Clinical Research

If you’ve had cancer, you know that the information presented to you following your diagnosis is like a crash course in medicine.

All of a sudden you’re hit with explanations of complex bodily processes, unpronounceable medicine names, and a deluge of statistics. You need to digest all of that and agree to a specific treatment plan, of which there may be several for your type of cancer. It can be overwhelming. But then again, what about cancer isn’t?

Making the “right” decision for you can be difficult. Many of us gravitate to the Internet for information, but that can be a minefield of questionable value. With some luck, we eventually get to PubMed, which is Ground Zero for medical information. PubMed is the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) database of published research on a variety of topics. These articles focus on biomedical fields, but the range is quite broad.

There, you can find the background information for the treatment decisions that your oncologist has made about your specific situation.

I would venture that bringing a relevant scientific article to your oncological appointment beats mentioning an ad for a new medicine where the announcer says, “ask your doctor if [insert med name here] is right for you”. But of course the commercial is easier to understand, while the research article is written in “science-ese”.

So, if there’s something that can serve as a true ally as you navigate through your cancer experience, it’s being science-literate. That doesn’t mean you need a PhD in some medical research field. But it does mean understanding how researchers set up experiments, what they’re actually studying, and whether those results are valid for your situation. And then being able to search through clinical studies and see whether they can inform your decisions on cancer treatments.

For digging deeper into the specifics surrounding clinical research, I highly recommend Coursera’s free class, “Understanding Medical Research: Your Facebook Friend Is Wrong.” I use PubMed at work and have studied research design in Psychology, but I realized that I needed a crash course in evaluating clinical studies if I wanted to use scientific literature to make informed decisions about my health. “Understanding Medical Research” is an excellent survey of the types of studies out there, basic research design, terminology, relevant statistics and how to judge whether the study is useful for your personal situation, not to mention warning flags to watch out for.

The course is free if you don’t need the Coursera certificate. And the instructor, nephrologist F. Perry Wilson, MD from the Yale School of Medicine, is entertaining and occasionally silly, making what could be a dry subject much more palatable.

This might not be the first online class that you’ll want to tackle right after your cancer diagnosis. For that, I would highly recommend seeking out a mindfulness meditation class. But after you’ve gotten relaxation skills under your belt, learning about how to access medical literature and decipher the results may be one of the most important things you can do for yourself.

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If you’re not ready to commit to a course on understanding medical research, below are two informational links that can still get you on your way to figuring out what all the research means:

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has a blog that explains findings from the latest cancer studies in lay terms, called “Cancer Currents”. The sidebar on the right allows you to zero in on more specific topics. This is the most science-based information that you can get on cancer, keeping in mind that studies can only speak to what they have specifically been designed to research.

For some general information on clinical studies, NIH’s webpage on “Understanding Clinical Studies” is a good place to start. This is a one-page easy read with a infographic that explains basic facts about clinical studies.