Interpretation by Physicians of Clinical Laboratory Results¶
Casscells, W., Schoenberger, A., & Graboys, T. B. (1978). Interpretation by Physicians of Clinical Laboratory Results. New England Journal of Medicine, 299(18), 999-1001.
Cited by¶
2 citations across 2 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Conditional Probability
- The medical-screening case is the paradigm that makes the stakes concrete: a 99%-accurate test for a disease with prevalence one in a thousand yields a positive-test posterior of roughly nine percent rather than the naively expected ninety-nine
This sourceDemonstrates base-rate neglect: a 99%-specific test for a disease of prevalence 1/1000 yields a positive-test posterior near 9%, not 99% — the canonical screening calculation.
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
The 1978 survey's abstract supplies the screening frame — a disease of prevalence 1/1000 put as a question to 60 clinicians — but truncates before the test's false-positive rate, so it states no 9% posterior.
“We asked 20 house officers, 20 fourth-year medical students and 20 attending physicians, selected in 67 consecutive hallway encounters at four Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals, the following question: "If a test to detect a disease whose prevalence is 1/1000 has a false positive rate of . . .”
- The medical-screening case is the paradigm that makes the stakes concrete: a 99%-accurate test for a disease with prevalence one in a thousand yields a positive-test posterior of roughly nine percent rather than the naively expected ninety-nine
Domain-specific¶
- Base Rate Fallacy
- The canonical form: a test for a disease that affects 1 in 1000 people has a 99% sensitivity and a 5% false-positive rate; a positive result still yields a true positive probability below 2%, but most people, including trained clinicians, report intuitions near 95%
Supported in partVerified against the source
- The canonical form: a test for a disease that affects 1 in 1000 people has a 99% sensitivity and a 5% false-positive rate; a positive result still yields a true positive probability below 2%, but most people, including trained clinicians, report intuitions near 95%
Verification¶
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Registry ID ref:cff084b33933 · see in the full table