Evaluating Health Claims in Complementary and Alternative Medicine

As healthcare costs continue to rise areas and life expectancies increase across the globe, it becomes ever more imperative that we know if our money is being spent well. The best way to do is to rely on healthcare practices that have a strong evidence-base supporting their use. Unfortunately, several issues can lead practitioners to use poorly studied or non-evidence-based treatments. Learning about how good research controls for these biases by taking into account placebo effects and regression to the mean allows practitioners to gain an understanding of if a particular study’s claims can be considered valid and reliable and should thusly inform what they do with their patients.