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I ran many clinical trials during my career as an academic neurosurgical anesthesiologist. "... it seems like it would be so tiresome" is accurate; it's also exhausting in terms of the huge amount of time and effort required to get a study approved by the institutional review board; getting informed consent from prospective patients after an exhaustive explanation repeated over and over to each individual; actually doing the study; organizing the results; doing the statistical analysis required; writing the paper; waiting months to hear back from the journal's reviewers, often receiving a rejection letter; resubmitting the paper to another journal, sometimes several more; after having it accepted, revising the paper per the reviewers' comments before resubmission, sometimes going back and forth for months.

You can find my published papers here:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5DdrMc8AAAAJ&hl=en




So how do you feel about it? :) Seriously, what are you feelings about it after all those experiences?

You forgot the end of the story: After all that, it's done and published, and then a random person with no expertise and who barely read the paper posts on HN: the sample size is too small - as if you were in your first week of statistics 101 - and therefore the whole thing must be invalid! :)


How do I feel about it? My feelings after all those experiences?

I dunno... that was me then, I guess: hard core academic with a drive/compulsion to publish good work.

I admit to being amused by comments here about statistics by people who wouldn't know a Bonferroni correction from a bonfire.




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