Medical Research

Perhaps as a simplified heuristic, it has become common for some medical researchers and physicians to refer to one category of evidence as superior to another. However, this is incorrect both logically and statistically. Trial design and statistical evaluation can and often do invert the quality and meaning of evidence in such hierarchies.

• A Critique of RCTs: The Gold Standard is Neither Supreme nor Ultimate explains why randomized control trials (RCTs) should not be viewed as the ultimate standard of medical evidence.
• A Critique of RCTs: Historical Failure to Strike Gold reviews literature demonstrating that RCTs tend to show the same results as observational evidence of medical effects.
• How to Rig Research by Statistically Stacking the Deck (A Simpson's Paradox Tale) How evidence of efficacy, such as that of hydroxychloroquine's efficacy, gets covered up through the mixing of pools of patients treated under different protocols.