Modern medicine is often called ‘evidence-based medicine’. This is because it is based on treatments or strategies that have been proven to show an advantage compared to other approaches.

Well-designed research can produce results that can be carefully studied, and often repeated in similar trials.

Without trial results, treatment decisions would only be based on a mixture of:

• guesswork or intuition
• on the hope that a treatment works
• on untypical results, or
• on commercial marketing.

Hard evidence is needed to know how to improve care.

Trials can show which drugs are better than others. For example, the higher risk of side effects when using d4T compared to tenofovir in first-line therapy.

Research can show which strategies are better than others. For example, that combinations that include three drugs to treat HIV are better that combinations with two drugs.