| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2008; all rights reserved.
Commentary: A debt of gratitude to J. Alison Glover
The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, 35 Centerra Parkway, Suite 300, Lebanon, NH 03766, USA.
E-mail: John.wennberg@dartmouth.edu
Accepted 4 December 2007
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
A surgical intervention is a dramatic event in the life of the patient. Few surgeons are hesitant believers in the efficacy of the operations they perform, nor do they doubt their clinical necessity. Most patients are convinced that the benefits of surgery exceed the risks by a wide margin. Yet in the face of such certainty and conviction, it is remarkable how much medical opinion on the need for surgery can vary from place to place, and how much uncertainty there is concerning what the risks and benefits are and what treatments patients actually want.
The work of J. Alison Glover has been a guiding light to many investigators interested in knowing why surgical practice varies so much from one community to another. He was the first to understand the significance of medical opinion in influencing the rate of surgery. He uncovered a more than four-fold variation in the incidence
 |
Scientific uncertainty and the pattern of variation |
|---|
|
The surgical signature phenomenon |
|---|
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
|
 |
|
  G. Davey Smith Big business, big science? Int. J. Epidemiol., February 1, 2008; 37(1): 1 - 3. [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|