Comments on: Number needed to treat http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2006/09/number-needed-to-treat.html Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:18:00 +0000 hourly 1 By: Diorahttp://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2006/09/number-needed-to-treat.html#comment-67429 Diora Wed, 27 Sep 2006 18:04:00 +0000 http://clients.emmense.com/kevinmd/2006/09/number-needed-to-treat.html#comment-67429 This has been one of my pet peeves forever. It's not just pharmaceutical companies that love to use relative risk instead of NNT, doctors routinely use RRR, including Kevin in his statin post some time ago. And if one looks at actual studies, NNT is indeed mentioned most of the time. Or can be calculated from the data. And before you use "lawsuits" as an explanation, what danger is a lawsuit while writing in a blog or a website? Yet there are many doctors' blogs, websites, boards that use relative risk reduction instead of NNT or absolute risk. Check out cholesterol board on a WebMD website. The doctor that answers questions there routinely uses relative risk reduction to convince people who complain about side effects they do have. Even people whose heart attack risk doesn't appear that great from the posts. <br/><br/>And it applies to all chronic desease prevention, screening as well as preventive drugs. This has been one of my pet peeves forever. It’s not just pharmaceutical companies that love to use relative risk instead of NNT, doctors routinely use RRR, including Kevin in his statin post some time ago. And if one looks at actual studies, NNT is indeed mentioned most of the time. Or can be calculated from the data. And before you use “lawsuits” as an explanation, what danger is a lawsuit while writing in a blog or a website? Yet there are many doctors’ blogs, websites, boards that use relative risk reduction instead of NNT or absolute risk. Check out cholesterol board on a WebMD website. The doctor that answers questions there routinely uses relative risk reduction to convince people who complain about side effects they do have. Even people whose heart attack risk doesn’t appear that great from the posts.

And it applies to all chronic desease prevention, screening as well as preventive drugs.

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