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EDITOR'S CHOICE: Fiona Godlee Charcot would have approved BMJ 2005; 330: 0-h [Full text]

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The mixmaster technique

BM Hegde   (19 March 2005)

I dont know french!

shiv budihal   (20 March 2005)

Re: I dont know french!

Leanne F Tite   (22 March 2005)

The mixmaster technique 19 March 2005
BM Hegde, Retd. Vice Chancellor Mangalore-575004, India Send response to journal: Re: The mixmaster technique	Dear Editor, “Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are not so often the result of a great design as of CHANCE.” La Rochefoucauld. "You could take the existing studies, fished out from Medline, assume they are similar enough to be combined and, voila! you have an entirely new study. This technique is called meta-analysis" wrote Steven Milloy in his book on statistics. It is almost like mixing oranges and apples. Heart failure is a multi-system disease, where the heart seems to be culprit but, soon enough the baton is taken over by the endocrine orchestra and many other organs. To base the prognosis of such an enigma with an isolated biochemical test is the height of reductionism in medicine. That said, I must congratulate the authors for showing an easy way to predict the unpredictable. Looks very impressive, but for those that have seen thousands of patients with heart failure, where even minor psychological upheavals could result in sudden death, prognostication is only a matter of CHANCE. A good book to read along side this meta-analysis would be the one recently written by Nortin M Hadler entitled The Last Well Person-How To Remain Well despite the Health Care system, published by McGill Queens University Press, Montreal. Even today sudden unexpected death remains an integral part of the natural history of heart failure irrespective of the cause. The present test comes as a great relief. Every new finding is true until it is proved to be untrue. That is called research. Charcot would have liked to be practising medicine today. Yours ever, bmhegde Competing interests: None declared
I dont know french! 20 March 2005
shiv budihal, doctor gadag 582103 india Send response to journal: Re: I dont know french!	Dear Madam, What do those french words by charcot mean, exactly? Not every reader of BMJ knows French! Regards Shiv Budihal Competing interests: None declared
Re: I dont know french! 22 March 2005
Leanne F Tite, Web administrator BMJ Publishing Group, WC1 Send response to journal: Re: Re: I dont know french!	Dear Shiv, The french phrases say: 'he will die' and 'he will die today'. Competing interests: None declared