Stuttering Therapy Outcomes Revisited

[ Contents | Search | Post | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ]


Re: Re: Uncertainty

From: Tom Weidig (thestutteringbrain.blogspot.com)
Date: 01 Oct 2009
Time: 11:08:02 -0500
Remote Name: 91.148.99.74

Comments

Hi Nan. Yes uncertainty is there but one needs to be more specific in order to have a proper economic discussion on the best choice of treatment. Uncertainty is three-fold: variation in benefits, variation in costs, and unknown average benefits and costs (and unknown variation of benefits and costs). A "rational" patient and a health provider must consider three dimensions: maximize benefit, minimize cost, and know and minimize uncertainty. It is unclear to me how one should deal with unknown benefit/costs/variation. For illustration, the uncertainty can be known (e.g. more fluency in 50% (benefit) and 10 sessions and 1000 dollars in 100% and tears in 20% (all costs)) or unknown. For example, a patient should prefer a treatment with known uncertainty in benefit and costs to a treatment with no data, because the patient knows what s/he gets. But if the benefits are low and costs are high, the patient might prefer to gamble on the unknown uncertainty as s/he cannot do much worse than the known certainty of low benefit/high cost of the other treatment. I hope it didn't confuse anyone... such discussions are common in finance where you have to decide on which investment to make: where you try to maximize profit (benefit-cost) and minimize uncertainty (risk).


Last changed: 10/01/09