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Q J Med 2000; 93: 121-124
© 2000 Association of Physicians

Commentary

Confidence limits and the limits of confidence

F. Kee

From the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, The Queen's University of Belfast, Belfast, UK

Address correspondence to Professor F. Kee, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, The Queen's University of Belfast, Mulhouse Building, Grosvenor Rd, Belfast, BT12 6BJ. e-mail:f.kee@qub.ac.uk


   Introduction
 
Someone once said that what goes up, must come down, but this never seems to be the case with workload. While most busy clinicians have been doing their best to keep their heads above water, others have been temporarily distracted by the many column inches devoted to whether or not Evidence-Based Medicine represents a new paradigm for their clinical practice. At times the debate has verged on the bilious, each side attempting to claim the high ground of authority, either by dint of training or experience. The view from one camp, for example, is that ‘ ... the difficulty with evidence based medicine lies with its exponents—their arrogance, their jargon and their penchant for denigrating others.’1 At its more extreme, statisticians should not evaluate clinical data, full stop. Witness the correspondence in the BMJ of September 26th 1998: ‘ ... We believe that the paper by the Cochrane injuries Group . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Confidence limits
 

   The limits of confidence
 

   References
 

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