I hate trying to come up with ideas for a research paper
(This is mostly a rant so I can get this off my chest and get back to working on my paper)
It's that dreaded time again, deciding on a research paper topic, this time for my graduate level health services research course. I thought I had a decent topic, "Should the United States take extreme measures to increase the number of organs for transplantation", but ultimately decided against it due to the fact the course wants us to write a paper that includes an experimental design, and you can't really do an experiment on a topic that requires you to first implement legal changes unless you focus solely on data from other countries that have adopted some of the topics I discussed in my first weekly mini-paper.
After several more hours of research I think I've come up with a new hypothesis: "Can probiotics prevent the onset of type II diabetes for high-risk individuals?" With this topic I can create a hypothetical double-blind experiment with the duration of a year to see if the use of probiotics with no other lifestyle changes prevented the onset of diabetes. Now I just need to Email my instructor and run this idea past her to see if it is accepted, wish me luck.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I like your idea; you will need to create a hypothetical double-blind, randomized clinical trial with specific inclusion/exclusion criteria to ensure your 'high risk' patient population is as controlled as possible. To prove it, the sample size needs to be large enough for statistical significance. There are a lot of other details as well, such as dosing and patient compliance. Good luck!!! 
I design and write protocols for human subject clinical trials - if you want to bounce anything off me I'd be happy to help.