Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2008; all rights reserved.
Editor's Choice |
‘Something funny seems to happen’: J.B.S. Haldane and our chaotic, complex but understandable world
E-mail: George.Davey-Smith@bristol.ac.uk
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Binary oppositions are relatively straightforward to recognize, and it is reassuring to run into them as we read the epidemiological literature. This issue of the IJE doesn't disappoint, in this regard, at least. Epidemiologists study both population and individual-level risk. Perhaps we ignore the former at the expense of the latter, for reasons that run from the methodological through to the political. Nancy Krieger1 suggests that such selective myopia allowed business as usual, while breast cancer rates rose as a response to widespread prescription of hormone replacement therapy for post-menopausal women in rich countries over the past four decades. In an accompanying commentary, Charlotte Paul2 cautions that national incidence rates only provide robust evidence regarding aetiology in strictly limited circumstances, perhaps when changes in rates are occurring contrary to expectation. Epidemiologists—as camp followers of statisticians—are traditionally frequentists or Bayesians, paradigms exercised in the discussions of