The truth is, few people know the first thing about clinical research. The public reads about a medical research project that announces unbelievable results for a miraculous drug and often jokes that it will later turn out just the opposite will be true.

And the public is often right.   For example, a 1994 headline in the San Francisco Chronicle announced “Hormones cut women’s risk of heart disease” but by 2001 that optimistic report was reversed as evidenced by a Washington Post article titled, “Hormones don’t protect women from heart disease.”

People are confused, and therefore increasingly skeptical, because they do not understand the process behind these conflicting results, says Ronald R. Gauch, Ph. D., author of It’s Great! Oops, No It Isn’t: Why Clinical Research Can't Guarantee The Right Medical Answers.  Gauch spent most of his adult life involved in the application of research methods to clinical investigations. He has been a primary player in important medical studies of major pharmaceutical companies and has also seen the research world from the academic side at Marist College.   As a consultant to the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, and working with a number of local health-related organizations, he is involved with both the academic and practical world of medical research.

Gauch understands why correct answers are so hard to achieve and he wrote the book to explain why medical researchers can never be sure that they've ended up with that one truthful answer and that the quest for knowledge through clinical trials is fraught with problems that even the best researchers cannot overcome. 

He is not on a mission to cause alarm in the public and have them disregard all medical research but he wants people to have enough of an understanding to maintain a healthy skepticism the next time they see an advertisement for a miracle cure on TV that has  been through a 'clinical trial' - which is often the gold standard for medical research but also the cause of incorrect results when the methodology is flawed.  He lays out the seven fatal flaws he says demonstrate why getting the right research answer is so problematic.  He certainly doesn't believe the notion that medical research is too complex for the average citizen to comprehend. 

Understanding clinical research gets done allows the reader to begin to ask his or her own questions, to challenge conclusions, to have doubts and not be afraid to raise them.   An active, informed population is never a bad thing.