A recent article in the British Medical Journal made the headline-grabbing claim that medical errors were now “the third leading cause of death in the US,” behind only cancer and heart disease. Medical errors, in their estimate, caused…

On Monday, a jury in Missouri hit Johnson & Johnson with a $55 million verdict in favor of a woman who developed ovarian cancer after decades of using talc baby powder in her vaginal area as part of her normal…

Heparin is one of the most basic medicines used in medicine, the primary anticoagulant used by hospitals, which is why it’s part of the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines.

But anticoagulants are so powerful that they…

“Evidence-based medical treatment guidelines” sounds like such a good idea. Who would want medical treatment that wasn’t based on evidence?

The problem is in the details. Way back in 1996, when “evidence-based medicine” was coming to the fore, the…

Over at The Green Bag, Judge Richard Posner published “What Is Obviously Wrong With the Federal Judiciary, Yet Eminently Curable, Part I.” The article is quintessential Posner: concise, expansive, forceful, and packed with good and bad ideas with…

An article on CNN last week began:

 
As a parent, this is another story that is impossible to comprehend: A 7-year-old girl is now dead after the bouncy castle she was playing on blew away at an Easter…

Back in July 2014, I wrote a post about the misuse of “statistical significance” by defendants and courts trying to apply the Daubert standard to scientific evidence. As I wrote,

 
It’s true that researchers typically use statistical formulas…