A Healthy Dose Of Normality: How research with “typical healthy people” can deepen our understanding of diseases
Andrew VincentWaves, United Kingdom
INTRODUCTION
Fundamentally, this paper is about context and in particular the importance of contextual data when researching attitudes and opinions among patients. Using examples, this paper demonstrates that without comparison to 'normal' healthy people, patient research is at best diminishing what we can potentially understand and at its worst reaching the wrong conclusions.
THE NEED FOR CONTEXT
The pharmaceutical industry has long known about the importance of data context. The Placebo effect was first introduced by Graves in...