Offline: An ignominious defeat

Doctors are taught to abhor bias. The aim of a research study is to achieve a result that comes as close to the truth as possible. Anything that systematically infl uences a result in such a way as to lead it away from the truth is bad. Bias can come in many different forms - patient selection, measurement, confounding, or at the time of publication. But are there hidden biases that we don’t take into account, biases that might be even more important than those we learn about in epidemiology? We rarely question the assumptions that lead us to devise and defend certain beliefs about health. Last week, a debate took place entitled “Architecture as Antidote: should cities make us fit.” Mehr