I have not had any experience yet on clinical studies but I would like to develop a little more on blinded clinical studies. In this type of study, subjects are blind to which treatment is given. There are three types of blind clinical studies,
1) Single Blind- The subject, but not the observer, does not know which of the possible treatments he is receiving.
2) Double Blind- Trial in which neither the subject nor the observer know which treatment is being administered.
3) Triple blind clinical studies – the participating subject, the observer-researcher and the researcher who analyzes the data do not know which treatment is being received.
These types of studies help control biased results. In a single study, the advantage is that by keeping the information secret, you can avoid any potential biased reactions or responses from the subject. Nevertheless, the observer runs a risk of consciously or subconsciously affecting the subject’s responses. This is why double blind is more beneficial. Double blind studies are the most convincing research design, in which randomly assigning the intervention can eliminate the influence of unknown or confounding variables that may lead to biased and incorrect estimate of treatment effect. A triple blind study are probably the most thorough about eliminations biased results. If the subject, observer and scientist do not know what the study is testing then the true and raw results can be determined thus avoiding omitting results because of biased experiments. Nevertheless, triple blind studies can be potentially dangerous when testing medical devices or pharmaceuticals.