Clinical trials in cancer

Clinical trials are clinical experiments in medicine and the randomized cli nical trial is a precision instrument that allows generation of the most re liable knowledge. Understanding the technology of clinical trials equips a clinician to run this precision experiment. But equally important is the im agination or intuition required to generate the ideas to be tested in an ex periment. Furthermore, even greater imagination is necessary to correlate t hese multiple facts derived from trials to guess a simple, strange yet beau tiful underlying generalization. This guess when tested within the tenets o f randomized trials allows us to arrive at the truth that is capable of eff ecting a paradigm shift or a major leap in understanding disease. The artic le deals with the achievements of clinical trials, the technology involved in running it and importance of unbiased, uninhibited thought for generatio n of novel avenues to be addressed in clinical trials.