Clinical research: a key to clinical training

Rational clinical decision making is at the core of any medical field, including psychiatry. Although clinical decision making should be based on reasoning logically from sufficient hard data, the process is often short-circuited; hypotheses are considered fact or causality is inferred where only association exists. This report describes how clinical research protocols provide a structure that helps train clinicians to reduce these errors. A good research design forces articulation and evaluation of hypotheses and prevents premature assumption of causality. The authors present case examples which show that clinical research can serve as in-service training for staff clinicians.