Clinical trials for drugs are often made by looking for an ideal trial population where the company believes the drugs will be most effective. That often means that the participants in the trial take fewer other drugs to avoid side effect interactions.
It depends on how you read the evidence, if you are using the trial info in good faith (rather than as just approval tool), the laxer the selection criteria the better, since you can assume more “noise” is accounted for.
There’s an idea that RCTs produce some kind of objective evidence that’s independent of how you read it. Understanding that the trial environment is different in various ways from the actual clinical environment is important to understand that there’s a need for translation and that needs subjective calls.
It depends on how you read the evidence, if you are using the trial info in good faith (rather than as just approval tool), the laxer the selection criteria the better, since you can assume more “noise” is accounted for.
--an
Agree with everything else that you said.
There’s an idea that RCTs produce some kind of objective evidence that’s independent of how you read it. Understanding that the trial environment is different in various ways from the actual clinical environment is important to understand that there’s a need for translation and that needs subjective calls.