Looking to do Clinical Research, where to start?

[deleted1009711]

Hey all,

I'll be starting med school in half a year. I want to match back in Cali, and so I realize research is probably a semi-requirement.

I hated basic research, but clinical research intrigues me. I have a lot of free time, and am taking a Biostats course right now.

1.) Is there any way to prepare for clinical research? I know I know, don't study before med school...I'm not really, it's just a side thing.

2.) What IS clinical research really? Why do we need a med student or physician to do it, it seems straightforward?

3.) Once I'm in, how do I get involved, do I learn on the job?

Thanks a huge bunch!!!!

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[7331poas]

I usually just look at the department I am interested in. See who is the one pumping out articles. Then I send them an email.

Best person to target is a younger faculty member who is looking to build their CV. Another good route is to ask the residents if you happen to know any.

 

[Sephirakra]

Hey all,

I'll be starting med school in half a year. I want to match back in Cali, and so I realize research is probably a semi-requirement.

I hated basic research, but clinical research intrigues me. I have a lot of free time, and am taking a Biostats course right now.

1.) Is there any way to prepare for clinical research? I know I know, don't study before med school...I'm not really, it's just a side thing.

2.) What IS clinical research really? Why do we need a med student or physician to do it, it seems straightforward?

3.) Once I'm in, how do I get involved, do I learn on the job?

Thanks a huge bunch!!!!

1. If your university has an account with the CITI Program (www.citiprogram.org), you can get some of your human subjects training done now. It's time-consuming but necessary.

2. Clinical research is just research that directly involves humans in some capacity. You actually don't have to be a medical professional to do it - I ran studies for about five years before med school. If a study is determined to be greater than minimal risk, though, you do have to have a physician attached.

3. Aside from general information about IRBs, human subjects protection, and maybe ICH-GCP, a lot of training will depend on the kind of studies you work on.

Clinical research has a lot more bureaucracy involved than basic research, and a lot of people hate that aspect. I kind of do too, but it's necessary to protect people. Research ethics are extremely important considerations in any study involving human subjects.

There's a lot more to it, but I'll let you ask questions rather than continuing with this wall of text.

Good luck!

 

[aldol16]

1.) Is there any way to prepare for clinical research? I know I know, don't study before med school...I'm not really, it's just a side thing.

Biostats. The biggest favor you can do yourself is to learn biostats well the first time. And not just the basics stats courses that are consisted of probability (not stats) for half the semester. You should be comfortable interpreting and understanding the principles behind survival curves (e.g. Kaplan-Meier), doing basic analyses of continuous and discrete variables when there are two vs more than two groups, running regressions, etc. More specialized stuff may include special regressions such as difference-in-difference, fixed effects, random effects, etc.

2.) What IS clinical research really? Why do we need a med student or physician to do it, it seems straightforward?

You need someone with clinical expertise to tell you what matters and what doesn't. That is why many studies using surrogate outcomes use "minimal clinically significant difference" as an estimate of what difference a result would actually make. Say you're interested in outcomes after endovascular triple A repair. You need a vascular surgeon to tell you what outcomes they would expect, what would be unusual/concerning, and what variables to control for (e.g. if you're looking at infection risk, you should be correcting for smoking, etc.). That's all clinical expertise. The data analysis and stats can be done by any statistician.

3.) Once I'm in, how do I get involved, do I learn on the job?

As a medical student, you'll mostly be involved in retrospective or non-randomized prospective studies. It's hard to get involved in clinical trials because that's where all the money is right now. They're huge undertakings with millions of dollars in funding and everything has to go right or else the entire trial was for nothing. So there are people who are keeping an eye on each step and lots of people who are involved at the outset. As a med student, you would be responsible at most for recruiting patients or doing some data analysis when it's all over. Authorship on those papers - unless they're small trials - would be lower given the huge effort it was at the beginning to design all of it.

The retrospective and non-randomized prospective studies are easiest to get involved in because the data is usually already collected or at least exists somewhere and you just have to extract it (e.g. from a chart). So you learn by doing basically. Take on a project to begin with, see what other people in the field are doing, and try to answer an interesting question. You'll learn something from/for each project as you go and you'll retain those skills going forward.

 

[seeinghowitgoes]

Hey all,

I'll be starting med school in half a year. I want to match back in Cali, and so I realize research is probably a semi-requirement.

I hated basic research, but clinical research intrigues me. I have a lot of free time, and am taking a Biostats course right now.

1.) Is there any way to prepare for clinical research? I know I know, don't study before med school...I'm not really, it's just a side thing.

2.) What IS clinical research really? Why do we need a med student or physician to do it, it seems straightforward?

3.) Once I'm in, how do I get involved, do I learn on the job?

Thanks a huge bunch!!!!

The bolded is a scary sentiment held only among people in medicine who don’t have no clue what they’re doing (at least when it comes to research). It’s why most published research findings are false. Read Frank Harrell, Vinay Prasad, Peter Goesche, or John Ioannidis to get even a little sense of the complexities and the amount of misinformation out there because people do shoddy clinical research work.

It’s easier and cheaper to publish bad (read: misinforming) clinical research than it is to publish bad basic science research, this is probably true. It is not easy to publish well done clinical research, let alone well done and impactful clinical research. To not simply be filling a CV with vapid opinion essays you need to work with content experts (ie clinicians) and methods experts (ie statisticians and sometimes epidemiologists).

Start by finding a mentor. Search your undergraduate college of public health or med school’s faculty and read some of their papers, meet with them and ask these questions. Taking biostats is also a reasonable start. When you get to medical school find a mentor and allow them to guide you through the IRB, basic research methods, etc. This is not a quick road, but it is tremendously satisfying and impactful, if done correctly.