Questioning Medicine

When you want to do an RCT but you realize there might be some cross contamination so instead of randomizing individuals you randomize cluters or groups Lets say you want to do fluids--- what is better LR or NS instead of doing individuals and room you just put whole hospitals in either LR or NS Or you want to test if mask work for some virus—you would say this city gets all the mask in the world and this city gets zero mask…you know that If you just gave some individuals in the city a mask then maybe someone who give their extra mask to their friends and you would have cross contamination meaning that that individuals in the group end up getting the intervention you are trying to test. Cluster RCT are GREAT for logistics and trying to figure out logistically can something or does something actually work However cluster RCT can be harder to analyze because the clusters may not always have the same exposures or the confounders might not be equal between clusters In our mask example that we just talked about le