Results for: bayesian

Prior Probability: the Dirty Little Secret of “Evidence-Based Alternative Medicine”—Continued Again

After the previous posting on the Bayesian approach to clinical trial data, several new comments made it clear to me that more needed to be said. This posting addresses those comments and adds a few more observations regarding the unfortunate consequences of EBM’s neglect of prior probability as it applies to “complementary and alternative medicine” (“CAM”).† The “Galileo gambit” and the statistics gambit...

/ February 29, 2008

Prior Probability: the Dirty Little Secret of “Evidence-Based Alternative Medicine”—Continued

This is an addendum to my previous entry on Bayesian statistics for clinical research.† After that posting, a few comments made it clear that I needed to add some words about estimating prior probabilities of therapeutic hypotheses. This is a huge topic that I will discuss briefly. In that, happily, I am abetted by my own ignorance. Thus I apologize in advance for simplistic or incomplete...

/ February 22, 2008

Prior Probability: The Dirty Little Secret of “Evidence-Based Alternative Medicine”

This is actually the second entry in this series;† the first was Part V of the Homeopathy and Evidence-Based Medicine series, which began the discussion of why Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) is not up to the task of evaluating highly implausible claims. That discussion made the point that EBM favors equivocal clinical trial data over basic science, even if the latter is both...

/ February 15, 2008

Homeopathy and Evidence-Based Medicine: Back to the Future Part V

Homeopathy and Science: Discussion, Summary and Conclusions I was not surprised by a couple of the dissenting comments after Part IV of this blog. One writer worried that I had neglected, presumably for nefarious reasons, to cite replications of Benveniste’s results; another cited several examples of “positive” homeopathy studies that I had failed to mention. I answered some of those points here....

/ February 8, 2008