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Letters submitted as Rapid Responses usually take a few weeks to
appear in the paper journal. Here we have a letter that appears the week
after the article it is criticising. I have just checked back and find
that Cleland replied, it seems to me quite robustly, to the criticisms of
Baigent and colleagues. Why did his rebuttal not appear in the paper
journal as well? Or must the holy temple of meta-analysis be protected?
The debate surrounding the issue of anti-platelet therapy is a
reminder that certainty is a rare thing in medicine, and the clarity of
answers provided by evidence-based medicine can sometimes be a distortion
of the statistical lens through which it is viewed.
Curioser and curioser
Letters submitted as Rapid Responses usually take a few weeks to
appear in the paper journal. Here we have a letter that appears the week
after the article it is criticising. I have just checked back and find
that Cleland replied, it seems to me quite robustly, to the criticisms of
Baigent and colleagues. Why did his rebuttal not appear in the paper
journal as well? Or must the holy temple of meta-analysis be protected?
The debate surrounding the issue of anti-platelet therapy is a
reminder that certainty is a rare thing in medicine, and the clarity of
answers provided by evidence-based medicine can sometimes be a distortion
of the statistical lens through which it is viewed.
Competing interests: No competing interests