One of the things I frequently do on this blog is to critique medical studies. There are also now a lot of blogs, youtube channels, etc. that do the same. However, the average person (understandably) really has no training on how to read or critique a medical study, so it occurred to me recently that providing an occasional post explaining some of the concepts that are frequently used when discussing medical studies might be a useful service to my readers.
Accordingly, today I will explain “power”, which is the term used to describe whether a study is or is not robust enough to detect the effect of an intervention. Let’s start with a silly example.
