Compared with standard care

There’s a decent argument in the analysis of quantitative studies of therapies, particularly using randomised controlled trial designs, that says that we should be looking at the totality of unbiased evidence (systematic reviews) rather than looking at individual, cherry-picked, studies. The best estimate from this comes from a pooling of all the results: meta-analysis.

There’s a challenge to this, though, when the comparisons are not quite the same. In the …