Who measures the Holy Dread?

doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7507.57-a

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Kevin Barraclough, general practitioner

Painswick, Gloucestershire

If you tell patients that a drug is shown in a trial to reduce their absolute risk by 0.2% per year they usually don't want it. They weigh the marginal absolute benefit against the harm of being “medicalised,” and they decline. The opinion forming “experts” who ran the trial take a different view. The experts demonstrate the relative risk reduction with bar charts at a string of lucrative international conferences. They sit on the guidelines …