What is experimental?

We’ve said before that evidence-based medicine is about using the ‘best available’ evidence, and that while we’d love all our treatments to be supported by large randomised clinical trials and systematic reviews, Archimedes is living proof that this often isn’t the case.

Sometimes we’ll be in the situation where the treatment could be quite reasonably subjected to a randomised trial. But there isn’t a trial that’s up and open to be accessed. So if we offer that treatment ... is it experimental? What makes a treatment ‘experimental’? What does ‘experimental’ even mean?

The concept I have is that an ‘experimental’ therapy is one where we haven’t used it for this indication. The drug may well have been used in humans, in children even, but the basis for the choice is entirely pathological. Each time we use a new drug though, it’s surely an ‘experiment’ for each child? This is...

from Archives of Disease in Childhood current issue https://ift.tt/2M38Klq