Type of research as a Doctor

[Alastriss]

I was wondering what the nature of the research is as a doctor. Scientific research such as microbiology/immunology/pathology is focused on finding pathways, studying the cell at the molecular level.

 

I know clinical research can involve clinical trials, but that doesn't sound like 'research' to me, since im under the impression you administer the drug and then monitoring the patients. Seems to involve a lot more statistics/epid.

[Medhopeful]

Ummm...statistics is a major part of any type of research. You need statistics to show that the findings you make are most likely to be true. This applies to clinical trials and lab research.

 

The goal of any research is to find an answer, whether that is trying to determine if a enzyme in a certain pathway is the cause of a certain disease or if you're trying to determine if one treatment is better than another. Part of clinical trials is administering the drug and assessing the response (the latter of which invovles so much paperwork, it's sometimes insane! ) but you can also get invovled in designing your own clinical trials, which can be challenging.

 

Also realize that these different research are complimenty. You need the lab research to help design the new drugs and testing the new drugs may reveal some new information about some pathways.

 

Edit: There's this doctor, in BC I think, who made a name for himself in research from simply doing retrospective studies, wherein the doctor tries to answer the question at hand by looking at the clinical history of patients and deriving the data that way. That is also another type of research. So really, lots of different kinds of research out there that a doctor can do

[Alastriss]

Ummm...statistics is a major part of any type of research. You need statistics to show that the findings you make are most likely to be true. This applies to clinical trials and lab research.

 

The goal of any research is to find an answer, whether that is trying to determine if a enzyme in a certain pathway is the cause of a certain disease or if you're trying to determine if one treatment is better than another. Part of clinical trials is administering the drug and assessing the response (the latter of which invovles so much paperwork, it's sometimes insane! ) but you can also get invovled in designing your own clinical trials, which can be challenging.

 

Also realize that these different research are complimenty. You need the lab research to help design the new drugs and testing the new drugs may reveal some new information about some pathways.

 

Edit: There's this doctor, in BC I think, who made a name for himself in research from simply doing retrospective studies, wherein the doctor tries to answer the question at hand by looking at the clinical history of patients and deriving the data that way. That is also another type of research. So really, lots of different kinds of research out there that a doctor can do

 

I agree that statistcs is a large part of any type of research that is to be successful, but many scientific labs aren't so concerned with the statistics involved, although they are critical. Im an undergrad student in a lab where we are researching a protein that causes uncontrollable growth and could be a valuable target for drug design, an so far i haven't seen a lot of statistics involved.

 

Is clinical research restricted mainly to clinical trials? besides the one example you mentioned can physicians be involved in other types of research that lean more towards drug development?

[Michelle]

As an epidemiologist, I can confirm that there are MANY ways to do health research that doesn't involve lab work. In addition to clinical trials, there are:

• health outcomes research (for example, I am currently working on a MRI waitlist project)
  
• case control studies (we've learned a lot about the link between smoking and lung cancer this way, for example)
  
• chart reviews
  
• prospective cohort studies (for example, we have learned a lot about risk factors for cancer and CV disease from the largest cohort study ever done - the Nurses' Health Study - which has been following a cohort of nurses since the 1970s)
  
• population-based surveys
  
• evidence-based medicine/systematic reviews are based on epi data
  
• and on and on.....
  

[Medhopeful]

Is clinical research restricted mainly to clinical trials? besides the one example you mentioned can physicians be involved in other types of research that lean more towards drug development?

 

You'll have to specify what it is exactly what you mean by drug development. In pharmaceuticals, the process of drug development runs from starting with pathway and making a new drug (or making a new drug and seeing what pathway(s) it affects) to seeing if it works, which part of it is running them through clinical trials (one of the last part of the drug development process). Are you interested in making the drugs and/or pre-drug compounds (using chemisty)? Or are you more interested in testing the new compounds in vivo/in vitro (like using animal models)?