Author archives: Elaine Finucane

Personal experiences or anecdotes (stories) are an unreliable basis for assessing the effects of most treatments

This blog explains why personal experience, or a series of personal experiences, can be misleading. Just because an individual got better after using a treatment does not mean that other people who receive the same treatment will also improve, or that the treatment is responsible – ‘regression to the mean’ tells us that experiences such as pain may improve anyway without treatment.