Friday, December 11, 2015

We Tried Baseball ...

Ron Jefferies put a name on a common misapplication of best practices We Tried Baseball and It Didn't Work.

There was an earlier, similar occurrence of the misapplication of best practices but in a different field. In the mid 1960s, a new chemotherapy regime was introduced with great results over the previous treatments but it was later criticized by a physician. Tough Medicine is essentially "We Tried Your Chemo Treatment and It Didn't Work". Almost halfway through the article is a description of a response to a talk about the treatment. Without testing, west coast physicians changed the formula and the treatment schedule to reduce the toxicity of the treatment and the consequences were lethal.