1.02 – Anecdotes are unreliable evidence
The fact that an individual got better after receiving a treatment does not mean that the treatment caused the improvement, or that others receiving the same treatment will also improve. The improvement (or undesirable health outcome) might have occurred even without treatment.
Claims about the effects of a treatment may be misleading if they are based on stories about how a treatment helped individual people, or if those stories attribute improvements to treatments that have not been assessed in systematic reviews of fair comparisons.
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