The 4-Hour Body - An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman - Timothy Ferriss
shoes of a big pharma researcher.
You have a pill. It's OK, maybe not that brilliant, but a lot of money is riding on it. You need
a positive result, but your audience aren't homeopaths, journalists or the public: they are
doctors and academics, so they have been trained in spotting the obvious tricks, like `no
blinding', or `inadequate randomisation'. Your sleights of hand will have to be much more
elegant, much more subtle, but every bit as powerful.
What can you do?
Well, rstly, you could study it in winners. Di erent people respond di erently to drugs: old
people on lots of medications are often no-hopers, whereas younger people with just one
problem are more likely to show an improvement. So only study your drug in the latter group.
This will make your research much less applicable to the actual people that doctors are
prescribing for, but hopefully they won't notice. This is so commonplace it is hardly worth
giving an example.
annaabi.ee 
