A little while back, we told you about the great conference Wired put on with MDAnderson, called WIRED DATA | Life.
And one of the standout presentations of that conference was put-on by inveterate smartass, David Newman, of the site: The Number Needed to Treat.
Well, Wired has seen fit to remind us of David & Co-Founder Graham Walker’s work in a recent Science post.
What the NNT tries to do is take the highest-quality studies it can find and publish a ratings-system for drugs & treatments.
It takes all the math and turns it into relatively-simple Indicators, Calculators, & Ratings so you &/or your doctor can have a look at how effective a certain course-of-action is; -rather than him just throwing a handfull of pills at you.
AND, they also weigh the drugs against the severity of the conditions they’re supposed to treat. -So that for more serious conditions, you might want to just roll the dice anyway.
In the piece over at Wired, Sarah Fallon goes over the system in a little more visceral depth with Newman than was possible with the uncanny-valley-android moderators at the DATA | Life conference, and is a worthwhile read. So are some of the comments, including ones from Newman & Walker.
If you’ve ever gone to WebMD or MayoClinic to check drug-interactions, uses & side-effects, especially about something serious, you owe it to yourself to check out both TheNNT.com and Fallon’s piece.
Check out the details at the Links:
Photo Credits:
“Elegant fractal design”, by Ivan Piven, designusfree.com
“Statistical tables”, by Katka Samkov,
Links:
• Source: TheNNT Explained + Video Intro
• via: Wired
• More Coverage: WIRED DATA | Life: TheNNT Presentation, by David Newman | WSJ-TheNNT Launches
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