Doing More Good Than Harm: The Evaluation of Health Care Interventions

Because the outcome of medical interventions is sometimes unintentionally harmful, analytic methods, including meta-analyses, are being developed and refined to evaluate the effects of treatment on a population. This book discusses the efficacy of various kinds of clinical trials in assessing the goodness of such treatments. It also deals with the ancillary issues of publication bias and the dissemination of information through the press, as well as the economic and political consequences of decisions that are taken.