[An open letter to Bob Park, author of What's New] Hi Bob, Thanks for another excellent instalment of What’s New. You might be interested to know that the WIRED piece on the placebo effect is seriously flawed. You mentioned that it is likely that we are getting better at designing trials to eliminate bias, and [...]

This week’s New England Journal of Medicine has a—shall we say—rather frank exchange of views on the methods for assessing casualty rates in Iraq following the 2003 invasion. Readers may well wonder how it is that two studies of deaths in Iraq could come up with a ten-fold difference in reported deaths. The short answer [...]