David Colquhoun, professor of pharmacology at UCL, has a new essay over at Aeon opining about the problems with p-values. A short while back, we also discussed p-value problems, and Colquhoun arrives at the same conclusions as us about the… Read More »Placebos for all, or why the p-value should have no place in healthcare decision making
Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources… Read More »Sam Watson’s journal round-up for 10th October 2016
The world’s highest impact factor medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), seems to have been doing some soul searching. After publishing an editorial early in 2016 insinuating that researchers requesting data from trials for re-analysis were “research parasites“,… Read More »Data sharing and the cost of error
Measuring causal effects is a tricky business. But, it’s necessary if we want to appropriately design effective policies and interventions. Many things are not amenable to manipulation in an experiment and so we rely upon a toolbox of statistical tools… Read More »Does political reform really reduce child mortality?
Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources… Read More »Sam Watson’s journal round-up for August 15th
A six hour delay flying home from the Health Economists Study Group conference in Gran Canaria is providing me with ample time to mull over the great issues in life. One of these big issues is of course the trade-off… Read More »Biased towards bias?
This a short post just to bring to your attention STAN, a tool for Bayesian statistical inference. It’s been around for a few years now but like many of these things it can be slow to percolate down to the… Read More »STAN: A tool for Bayesian inference and MCMC
Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources… Read More »Sam Watson’s journal round-up for 21st March 2016
In a previous post I asked whether the study by Claxton et al can or should inform the cost-effectiveness threshold used by NICE. The authors argued that, “it is the expected health effects … of the average displacement within the… Read More »Identifying the effect of expenditure on health outcomes: another small comment on Claxton et al
Today sees the publication of surgeons’ death rates on the MyNHS website (see Guardian and BBC stories). The website presents full lists of surgeons by specialty alongside either blue circles with a large ‘OK’ inside, grey circles with question marks, or… Read More »Is there any use in publishing surgeons’ death rates?