4 ms·

only 5000 or so trials, easy

• Retric 3y ago
  5,000 isn’t a guarantee, but your already at 10% odds of at least one hit with 527 trials. Considering how many of these get conducted and the odds are often better than 50/50, I expect multiple trials have cured everyone.
• bawolff 3y ago
  In the history of the world, i am pretty sure there have been more than 5000 cancer trials.
  • inglor_cz 3y ago
    This entire chain of comments rests on the presumption of a "coin toss". If colorectal cancers in 2nd or 3rd stage actually had a fifty-fifty chance of spontaneous remission in the real world, the disease would be a lot less scary than it is. They don't. Spontaneous remission does happen, but isn't common. The chance that a 12-patient trial produces spontaneous remission in all 12 patients in a truly random fashion, is much smaller than 1:5000. And the GP actually mentioned it. But everyone reacting to him still addresses the 1:5000 value. It is a nice example of anchoring as described by Daniel Kahneman - here is a number, let's cling to it.
    • dekhn 3y ago
      You totally misunderstood my comment. I never meant that all 12 patients had spontaneous remission. I understand why people think that- my statement was ambiguous. What I did mean was that it's possible that some of the patients cancers went into remission for a reason that was not specific to this drug. It could be 11 people got better because of the drug- and 1 got better because they were being treated in a world-class hospital with a number of other factors that affect disease progression. THat's how it works in clinical trials. I didn't make my statement out of ignorance- I worked adjacent to trials for decades and have seen all sorts of claims of results that didn't hold up to scrutiny.