Journal Title:  PSICOTERAPIA E SCIENZE UMANE

Author/s: Paul Meehl

Year: 2007 Issue: 3 Language: IT
Pages: 20 Fulltext PDF:166 KB

Why i do not attend case conferences.ABSTRACT: The author explains why he does not attend any more clinical case conferences, in order to improve them. In the first part a dozen of errors are described: buddy-buddy syndrome; all evidence is equally good; reward everything, gold and garbage alike; tolerance of feeble inferences (e.g., irrelevancies); failure to distinguish between an inclusion test and an exclusion test; failure to distinguish between mere consistency of a sign and differential weight of a sign; shift in the evidential standard, depending upon whose ox is being gored; ignorance (or repression) of statistical logic; inappropriate task specification; asking pointless questions; ambiguity of professional roles; some common fallacies (e.g., the Barnum effect). In the second part, which is not destructive but constructive, there are suggestions to improve the functioning and usefulness of clinical case conferences. [KEY WORDS: case conferences, clinical judgment, clinical evidence, single case, statistics]