Catachresis, the mistaken use of one term for another, can arise through confusibility, which I discussed last week, or through ambiguity. Ambiguity (Latin amb-, implying both ways, + agere to drive) is the capacity of a single term to be understood in two or more ways. It can be lexical (i.e. affecting a word), grammatical, […]
Hindsight bias is a real and very powerful phenomenon, and not just in radiology […]
The public still have high levels of trust in doctors as a profession, but we must not take that trust for granted […]
We need to change the course of medicine from a battle that can never be won to a humane enterprise […]
Catachresis (Greek κατάχρησις, from χρῆσθαι to use, κατά giving a sense of perversion) is the mistaken use of one term for another. When not due to sheer ignorance, it can arise through confusibility or ambiguity. Confusibility occurs when two or more terms can easily be mistaken for each other. Ambiguity is the capacity of a […]
Peter Brindley contemplates how Victorian medicine and its failings holds up a mirror to medicine now […]
Last week I discussed the concept of teleoanalysis, in which different types of evidence from disparate sources are analysed either simultaneously or sequentially. To be clear, the term implies not the very last analysis that could be done, but a thorough systematic analysis of all the evidence available at the time, from, for example, randomised […]
At a meeting on the politics of marriage last week at the London School of Economics three protagonists of very different stripe—the founder of the Marriage Foundation, a feminist philosopher, and a gay rights activist—all agreed that marriage was an outdated institution that should be rethought. My wife and I, who went together to the […]
A youthful Christine Keeler sits in custody refusing to answer questions, cigarette in hand. Season 2 of Netflix’s The Crown, culminates with the Profumo affair. It is 1963, six years after The Medical Research Council had published a statement announcing “a direct causal connection” between smoking and lung cancer, and that scene sadly foreshadows Keeler’s […]
A meta-analysis is an analysis of analyses. Specifically, it is an analysis of the combined results of several studies, typically randomised clinical trials. However, other forms of evidence can be adduced in seeking information about effects in medicine. It is possible to perform meta-analyses on data from observational studies and even case series or case […]