LETTERS

While my experience, I'm sure, is an outlier, I think it raises a different viewpoint than that of the authors when they say "Inadequate understanding of clinical trials and of the informed consent process has legal and ethical implications and may exacerbate negative perceptions about the research enterprise." [...] I ask again, does the right of research participants to be informed mean only that they are entitled to a lay explanation, or is it reasonable to provide them with a detailed explanation of the intervention and the trial process if they are able to comprehend it? I fully understand that in a blinded trial, participants and the research team cannot see anything that would break the blind, but I was told that I couldn't even get the nonproprietary information I needed to do a MEDLINE search.