Does Receiving Your Preferred Treatment Change Symptom Improvement?
In an ideal clinical trial that examines multiple treatments for a condition, patients are assigned a treatment randomly. This means that upon learning of the different potential treatment options that a clinical trial offers, the patient may not be assigned the treatment that they have a preference for. In this case, the patient may not attend treatments as regularly, or adhere to the treatment schedule as strongly if they were assigned a treatment they weren’t as interested in. The question that researchers ask in this study is: can patient treatment preference predict if the patient will receive benefits from the treatment?