• evidence based medicine
• health service

Being sure

The whole issue of how convinced we can be, in an evidence-based medicine sense, that our recommended treatments will do (on average) more good than harm is tricky. Sometime it is not—with a low-toxicity, cheap, intervention with relatively good effect—paracetamol for pain. Sometimes it is—third-line chemotherapies for relapsed Ewing’s sarcoma. The process of getting to an understanding of where that decision may fall can be conceptualised as determining the outcomes of importance, assessing how sure we are about the effect on …