Abstract
The practice of medicine is becoming increasingly complex and, paradoxically, despite greater knowledge, even more uncertain1. Today, knowledge itself is defined on the basis of an arbitrary but accepted statistical test, performed in a randomised clinical trial2. What the physician thinks, suspects, believes, or has a hunch about, is assigned to the “not-knowing” category. Technical advances, expected to reduce clinical uncertainty, have not only contributed to its increase, but have even been used to obscure it1. Obscurity and uncertainty are also promoted by the lack of statistical expertise of the average clinician and by the sophisticated, sometimes overtly unclear, presentation of trial results.
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Ector, H., Heidbüchel, H., Van de Werf, F. (1998). Survival Analysis and Classification of Death in Patients under Antiarrhythmic Treatment. In: Vardas, P.E. (eds) Cardiac Arrhythmias, Pacing & Electrophysiology. Developments in Cardiovascular Medicine, vol 201. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5254-9_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5254-9_18
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