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The Hippocratic Oath, Effect Size, and Utility Theory

General Motors Research Labs, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, robert.bordley @gm.com

To be consistent with the Hippocratic Oath, this article proposes that a physician choose that treatment that has the greatest chance of giving the patient an outcome no worse than the uncertain outcome an untreated patient would experience. As this article shows, this specifies the utility function that the physician should use in choosing among treatments. This utility function, although varying with the life circumstances of the patient, need not reflect the patient's utility function. This Hippocratic utility function can be estimated with an effect size measure similar to the stochastic superiority and common language effect size measures used in the statistical analysis of experiments.

Key Words: ethics • effect size • utility • decision making • statistics in medicine.

This version was published on May 1, 2009

Medical Decision Making, Vol. 29, No. 3, 377-379 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0272989X09333128


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