> > it makes sense to look at change from baseline for individuals in the various groups rather than just differences in raw scores between treatment groups. >

> > it makes sense to look at change from baseline for individuals in the various groups rather than just differences in raw scores between treatment groups. > That’s called cherry picking. Results are always noisy. You could give two groups of people the same tests on different days without any drugs at all and some subset would show “improvement”. No, GP is talking about a matched pairs design. You look at the difference between the scores of very similar individuals by applying one treatment to each (active and placebo), or, applying both treatments to the same individual (in random order). Cherry-picking would mean only using scores from selected individuals, whereas matching only emphasizes the difference.