The Categorical Variables just get one post. It’s not because they aren’t important. It’s because I’ve already said what I’m up to in this series. And because they’re easy… METHOD 1: the spreadsheet I thought it would be easiest to start with the spreadsheet itself this time because the column headings make it easy to […]
Being born in early December 1941 meant that I came in at the end of the last movie just when the next one was starting. And by the time I came into awareness, there were a couple of realities that for all I knew had always been in place – the Iron Curtain and the […]
Robert Spitzer, 83, Dies; Psychiatrist Set Rigorous Standards for Diagnosis New York Times By Benedict Carey December 26, 2015 The Passing of Robert Spitzer Architect of the DSM Psychology Today By Edward Shorter December 28, 2015 Setting the Record Straight: The Psychiatric Legacy of Robert Spitzer Mad in America By Bonnie Burstow, PhD January 05, […]
In a way, what I’m trying to do here is at cross purposes with some of my own beliefs. Short term Randomized Clinical Trials [RCTs] can tell us whether a drug has the desired medicinal properties; something about the strength of those properties; the incidence of early adverse effects; and can identify some but certainly […]
Generally, folk heros are from the past like John Henry and represent some laudable principle – like man versus machine. Back in the upside-down years of the 60s, Arlo Guthrie had a shot with his endless comical antiwar song, Alice’s Restaurant. The premise, however, was dead serious. When enough people get behind a needed change, […]
I got a bit garbled at the end of the last post, so let me start over. I’ve been looking at these two studies, each of which have four groups – placebo and three doses of medication. My table shows three pairwise comparisons in two articles – placebo vs each dose of Brexpiprazole: The results […]
John Henry was an American Folk Hero. He was a steel driving man in the era when they laid the railroad lines by hand. In one version of the legend, when they introduced a steam-driven hammer to cut the tunnels, John Henry and the new-fangled machine were pitted against each other. John Henry won with […]
[continued from outcome switching…] My title is facetious – guilty as charged. What I’m pointing to is that there are more ways to bugger a Clinical Trial Protocol than changing the outcome variables after the study is underway like they did in Paxil Study 329. One way is to change the dataset definition [what comes […]
In our reanalysis of Paxil Study 329 [Restoring Study 329: efficacy and harms of paroxetine and imipramine in treatment of major depression in adolescence], we challenged the fact that the published paper reached it’s conclusions about efficacy based on an analysis of outcome variables that were not included in the a priori protocol: There were […]