Last week I discussed Paracelsus’s well-known statement, first published in his Sieben Defensiones in 1564, that “only the dose determines that a thing is not a poison.” I suggested, based […]
Jeff Aronson’s Words
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . “Nothing is not a poison”
Paracelsus was a Swiss physician, alchemist, and astrologer, born Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim in about 1493. He died in 1541, and his Sieben Defensiones, written in 1538, were […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Archaic
On 18 March 2019 the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, invoked a principle, dating back to 1604 and last used in 1920, that dictates that MPs may […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Hyphenation
From time to time someone writes asking me to explain some aspect of punctuation. Recently I have been asked to arbitrate between “sub-group” and “subgroup”. I prefer the latter. The […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Core outcome sets and harms in clinical trials
Last week I discussed composite outcomes and the initiative known as COMET (Core Outcome Measures in Effectiveness Trials). In doing so I asked how many core outcome sets (lists of […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Composite outcomes and core outcome sets
Last week I discussed the composite origins of the word “composite”. It comes from the Latin words cum, with or together, and ponere to put. Ponere comes from aposinere, a […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Composite
Ideally, when studying the effects of an intervention one wants to measure the final outcome or outcomes. For example, the real endpoints of treating hypertension are the incidences of its […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a Word…Biomarkers—classifications
“Classification” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a systematic distribution, allocation, or arrangement of things in a number of distinct classes, according to shared characteristics or perceived or […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Biomarkers for predicting adverse drug reactions
The early hopes of those who have promoted pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics as tools for determining the therapeutic use of medications in the individual patient were that gene variants (polymorphisms) would […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Biomarkers—advantages and disadvantages
Last week I suggested that many terms, such as “biological markers”, “surrogate markers”, “intermediate markers”, “surrogate response variables”, “surrogate endpoints”, “intermediate endpoints”, “biomarker endpoints”, and “intermediate marker endpoints”, could be […]