This points to the biggest contradiction for evidence-based medicine: it’s often at odds with personalized medicine. We like to say that the plural of anecdote is not statistics, but we squirm a bit when asked to contemplate that the opposite is also true.
Yet our best tools for understanding how the body works require n>>1 for us to learn anything meaningful. You can’t do statistics on a single event, be it an actual literal miracle or just an unexpected one-off effective treatment. How often do we directly observe the limits of our epistemic system, and then complain that reality isn’t adjusting to the tools we prefer to use for measuring it?
This points to the biggest contradiction for evidence-based medicine: it’s often at odds with personalized medicine. We like to say that the plural of anecdote is not statistics, but we squirm a bit when asked to contemplate that the opposite is also true.
Yet our best tools for understanding how the body works require n>>1 for us to learn anything meaningful. You can’t do statistics on a single event, be it an actual literal miracle or just an unexpected one-off effective treatment. How often do we directly observe the limits of our epistemic system, and then complain that reality isn’t adjusting to the tools we prefer to use for measuring it?