title: Statistical significance testing and clinical trials.
abstract: The efficacy of treatments is better expressed for clinical purposes in terms of these treatments' outcome distributions and their overlapping rather than in terms of the statistical significance of these distributions' mean differences, because clinical practice is primarily concerned with the outcome of each individual client rather than with the mean of the variety of outcomes in any group of clients. Reports of the obtained outcome distributions for the comparison groups of all competently designed and executed randomized clinical trials should be publicly available no matter what the statistical significance of the mean differences among these groups, because all of these studies' outcome distributions provide clinically useful information about the efficacy of the treatments compared.
authors.affiliation: msk514@msn.com
authors.forename: Merton S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Krause
mesh_terms: D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D017063:Outcome Assessment, Health Care / Q000379:methods*; D011613:Psychotherapy / Q000379:methods* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D016032:Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012107:Research Design / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*