Editor's note: Author Paige Mullins wrote the massage intervention for the Integrative Medicine for Pain in Patients with Advanced Cancer Trial (IMPACT). Here are three lessons she learned from her first clinical trial.
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No. 1: Research Is a Team Sport
One of my biggest surprises was realizing how collaborative research really is. It reminded me of putting on a Broadway show. Grant writers, statisticians, software developers, research coordinators, clinicians, and investigators all worked on different parts of the same production. Weekly meetings became one of my favorite parts of the project because I didn’t just hear updates—I learned how experienced researchers thought through study design, questioned assumptions, and solved problems.
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Explore more from Paige Mullins’s research journey:
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Before enrollment, we rehearsed everything. Staff members played the role of patients while we tested the software and walked through every study procedure. Even after enrollment began, the process felt less like opening night than Broadway previews. We were still refining the experience with every participant.
No. 2: How We Measure Matters
Another lesson was realizing that measurement is never as simple as it seems. I used to think of pain scales as straightforward, yet over the years I’d watched patients struggle to assign a number to their pain. Before becoming involved in research, I had never really considered how the wording of an assessment could make it easier for patients to relate their experience. For the IMPACT study, the research team used a pain scale that supplemented the familiar “0 is no pain and 10 is the worst pain imaginable” prompt with brief descriptions of how pain affected everyday life—whether it was simply noticeable, beginning to change activities or prompt medication use, or interfering with enjoyment and participation in daily life. Those contextual descriptions gave participants a shared frame of reference and reminded me that the way we ask a question shapes not only the data we collect, but also the conversation that follows.
No. 3: Research Has Its Own Culture
One thing I didn’t appreciate when I first became involved in research was that research has its own culture and conventions. As clinicians, we’re often focused on patients and the work itself. Research also operates within a framework of funding, timelines, publication, authorship, and clearly defined roles. Those norms weren’t obvious to me when I started, and I learned they can have important implications for everyone involved in a project.
If you’re interested in participating in research, don’t hesitate to ask early about roles, responsibilities, authorship, and how contributions will be recognized. Those discussions are much easier at the beginning of a project than at the end. They may feel awkward, but they’re a normal—and important—part of collaborative research.
Developing a massage protocol for the IMPACT study underscored that practitioners’ clinical reasoning and patient-centered understanding developed in clinical practice is critical to the research conversation.
