Group items tagged

Whether it's quitting smoking, reducing alcohol intake or making healthier dietary choices, many of us have habits we'd like to change. But it's really hard to know which treatment path to take. To advise their patients on the best of course of action, doctors sometimes compare treatments using something called the "number needed to treat" (NNT). In deciding whether to embark on a course of treatment, NNT can help. But the term is easily misunderstood by patients, and doctors as well. So it's useful to break down what NNT means.

Some advice on evaluating claims made on data Bergstrom believes that calling bullshit on data, big or otherwise, doesn't require a statistics degree-only common sense and a few habits of mind. "You don't have to understand all the gears inside a black box in order to evaluate what you're being told," he said. For those who were unable to enroll in INFO 198/BIOL 106B this spring, here is some of his and West's advice:

how could two groups of 'experts' come up with such different conclusions, given they broadly agree of the evidence? David Aaronovitch in the Times identified the critical underlying issue behind the ensuing conflict: whether we take an individual- or a population-based approach. Essentially, the authors point out that any absolute risks are small from an individual perspective, and may generally be cancelled out by the enjoyment of eating, and the bother of changing habits. But these small benefits can be important from a public-health, population-wide perspective, since a lot of people making a small change, that only reduces their risk by a personally-negligible amount, can add up to thousands fewer cases of disease. That's what has generated the disagreement. It can be perfectly reasonable for guidance to be given by authorities, and it can also be perfectly reasonable for individuals to ignore it. Both can be 'right'.