Why do we need research evidence?

Author: SCIRE Community Team | Reviewer: Janice Eng | Published: 24 April 2017 | Updated: 23 February 2024

There are many different sources of health information. We may hear about a friend’s experience, read a news article online, or simply listen to a doctor’s advice. However, this information may not always be as accurate as we believe.

• All people can have conscious or unconscious beliefs that affect their judgments, even when those beliefs are not true. These biases can influence which treatments a doctor recommends or how a reporter writes about a treatment, in ways that might not be accurate.
• When we hear about another person’s experience with a treatment, we often assume that our experience would be the same, which is unlikely to be true – it takes very large groups of people to get an accurate picture of the effects of a treatment.
• We often make assumptions about the connections between a treatment and an outcome. However, unless strict controls are put in place, we cannot know for sure what actually caused an outcome. For example, it can be impossible to know if a medical treatment helped a person recover after an SCI, or if it was just the result of natural (spontaneous) recovery.

After an SCI, a certain amount of functional recovery happens in the period after the injury, where many people will see some improvements in their function even without treatment. This is called natural or spontaneous recovery.

When a person has an injury, they may receive medical treatments to help recover function. At the same time, their body may recover some function on its own through natural recovery. In this situation, it may be difficult to tell how much of the recovery is from the treatment and how much is from natural recovery.

Research evidence is important because the scientific methods used in well-designed research studies are more objective (unbiased) and accurate than conclusions based on other sources of evidence.

Some of these scientific methods may include:

The process of obtaining research evidence should be systematic and unbiased.³

• Using research techniques like blinding, control groups, and randomization to minimize bias.
• Studying large groups of people to identify patterns that may not be seen in smaller groups.
• Using special statistics to find out whether the findings could have simply been caused by chance.
• Providing a clear explanation about how the study was done, so you can think for yourself about how to interpret its findings. This also allows other researchers to repeat (replicate) the study to see if they get the same results.
• Requiring researchers to report any conflicts of interest (like if the authors have a financial interest in a product they are testing) to ensure that their research findings are independent of outside influences.
• Peer-reviewing a study to ensure it meets research standards before it is published.