
Lies, damn lies and statistics: A Stanford wiz says P<0.05 offers deceptive evidence of biopharmas' drug claims
The biopharma R&D world revolves around one simple formula: A P value of less than 0.05 in a pivotal study. But a top professor of medicine and statistics at Stanford says it’s a poor measure of value, and he wants to scrap it for something far more demanding — and far more valuable.
Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, John P A Ioannidis notes that the P value cutoff “is wrongly equated with a finding or an outcome…being true, valid, and worth acting on. These misconceptions affect researchers, journals, readers, and users of research articles, and even media and the public who consume scientific information.”
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