Methodology is hard. And making valid inferences is very hard. With regard to these topics, orthopaedic research is not very different to other field in medicine. It means that misconceptions, misunderstandings and flawed approaches are prevalent also in our field. American Journal of Sports Medicine published recently two papers which both made a quite common, […]
Tag: statistics
Propensity scores, orthopaedics and shared decision making
This is something I posted on Twitter last October. Extended discussion can be found below the tweets Propensity score matching is often used when two cohorts of patient are compared. Aim is to have somewhat comparable groups so effect of treatment or intervention could be estimated reliably. In short, two groups of patient tread by […]
Uncertainty in medical decision making
“The failure to train doctors about clinical uncertainty has been called “the greatest deficiency of medical education throughout the twentieth century.” Djulbegovic (2004), https://www.bmj.com/content/329/7480/1419 Life is full of uncertainties. In decision making uncertainty means that it is impossible to define future outcomes. Amount of medical information continues to grow exponentially, but uncertainty is still inevitable […]
No evidence of no evidence
In the null hypothesis significance testing framework, failure to reject the null is never evidence in support of null. However, it is extremely common that failure to reject the null, ie. getting a p-value larger 0.05 is interpreted as “no difference” or “no evidence”. As many experts have said, “absence of evidence is not evidence […]
Industry based evidence synthesis
In 2017, me and colleagues published both a literature and registry based analysis of use of metal-on-metal hip replacements. This study, titled Lack of evidence—the anti-stepwise introduction of metal-on-metal hip replacements, was a hypothesis-driven study since at that time it seemed that the use of ASR hip replacements was not that evidence based but mainly […]
Post-hoc power – Alone in the universe
Prologue Firstly, it is important to describe what post-hoc power really means. Post-hoc power is the power of the test using effect size observed and sample size used in the study. For this reason post-hoc power is often labeled as observed power. If for any experiment the effect size, parameter estimates and sample size is […]
You don´t need to think twice about delaying ACL surgery if you´re >40 years old
This bothered me a lot, so I acted upon it. A prestigious sports surgery journal, American Journal of Sports Medicine, marketed their own study in Twitter like this:
Congress bingo!
Being in the worlds largest meeting in my field, I can´t help noticing those little things. Therefore I drafted a congress bingo! Feel free to use and entertain yourself!