[Witch hunt and hypotheses loss].

Authors :: Köhler D
Source :: Deutsche medizinische Wochenschrift (1946) [Dtsch Med Wochenschr] 2015 Dec; Vol. 140 (25), pp. 1894-7. Date of Electronic Publication: 2015 Dec 16.
Publication Year :: 2015
Abstract: At this time randomized controlled studies (RCT) in clinical trials usually have high quality. But this quality is only true for the included patients (intrinsic validity). It is common to generalize the results to more or less similar patients. This inductive method is prohibited in epistemology what is known for 250 years (D Hume, K R Popper). Therefore the external validity for the data of RCT is low. To solve this problem additional clinical and pathophysiological based data are necessary to generalize the results. Unfortunately RCT show less quality in their premises. This is partly due to the influence of the pharmaceutical industry. A loss of universality of the hypothesis for RCT decreases basically the extrinsic validity. The articles describe this problem with examples.<br /> (© Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.)