How Should Practicing Physicians Interpret the Published Data for Patients?
” Although his subject matter is different from that of this paper, in addressing the question his title poses, Brett offers the reader some observations and approaches that are highly useful here: “Intervention based on risk factors differs qualitatively from treatment of an already manifest disease. It offers specific people therapeutic manipulations on the basis of statistical risk, not existing illness. … As long as a recommended type of behavior is at worst harmless, it may be ethically imposed without unequivocal proof of benefit; the possiblity of benefit may suffice.” He notes that a strongly interventionist perspective may color the published findings of large trials, and he suggests three perspectives from which to interpret data to patients: (1) the relative differences between cases and controls, (2) the absolute differences between cases and controls, and (3) those without the morbid event and htose who, having had the intervention, still experience the morbid event. Thi
