Andrew Gelman

For this issue’s column on ethics and statistics, I consider two examples of medical trials. The first is a clear case of an ethical violation described by bioethicist Carl Elliott. As a doctor, Elliott focuses on individual patents; as a statistician who has done a small amount of consulting for pharmaceutical companies, I’ve been trained to focus on the goal of accurately estimating treatment effects. (Medical ethicists such as Ezekiel Emanuel have written about the sometimes conflicting goals of caring for the patients in a study and providing expected benefit to future patients.)

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