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Book Review: Techniques of Patient-Oriented Research

The amount of information necessary to practice in the clinical environment continues to increase daily. As a result, curricula in clinical programs have become increasingly strained and the amount of time devoted to teaching basic research skills has steadily declined. Techniques of Patient-Oriented Research attempts to fill this gap by providing an introduction to the basic principles of clinical research. It is written for medical students, residents, and fellows; however, the principles outlined are useful for any clinician who is beginning to conduct clinical research. The book is based on a series of seminars on an Introduction to Clinical Research presented at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. The authors cover the basics of clinical research, starting with a review of the decline in the number of physicians trained to do research and what this means to the future of clinical research. The subsequent chapters discuss various aspects of clinical research, including grantsmanship, study design, laboratory techniques, and statistical analysis. More in-depth discussions of these topics can be found elsewhere; however, these chapters provide an adequate introduction to the topics with some basic guidelines. One of the strengths of this book is its coverage of topics that are typically covered only briefly or not at all in other publications of this nature. Examples include chapters on the role of the Investigational Review Board in protecting human subjects and its implications for writing protocols, nutritional aspects of clinical research, and the basics of how to write a scientific paper, all of which are important to the novice investigator. The first section of the chapter on statistics is largely repetitive of material presented in previous chapters. The remainder of the chapter presents brief overviews of various statistical considerations, such as blinding, data collection forms, and various statistical methods. Two highlights of this chapter are the discussions of sample size determination and confidence intervals. Finally, the last chapter reviews the importance of submitting the results of clinical research for publication and outlines the steps involved in writing a scientific paper. This chapter should be particularly useful to the inexperienced writer. The experienced researcher will not find detailed discussions of research techniques in this text; however, that is not the intent of this book. Techniques ofPatient-Oriented Research is an easy-to-read introduction to the steps involved in basic clinical research and will be useful to anyone interested in becoming involved in clinical research.