"Rosamund Snow: What makes a real patient?"

[Dolphin]

19 Jul, 16 | by BMJ
http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2016/07/19/rosamund-snow-what-makes-a-real-patient/

Rosamund Snow, patient editor, The BMJ. Twitter: @BMJPatientEd

Theory 2: Real patients don’t have the ability to acquire knowledge

From throw away comments by researchers and clinicians, I suspect real patients are supposed to be a bit gormless. I’ve sat on a lot of PPI groups where healthy researchers provide the structure of the meeting and offer round the biscuits, and the patients provide the naivety. These are the groups where we end up “commenting on lay summaries” rather than having any useful input on research questions and outcomes. We’re allowed to remind the researchers why they went into the job in the first place, but we’re not supposed to be able to comment on methodology, even if the methodology is flawed because the researchers aren’t aware of their own biases.