Dear all:

I have to get over my annoyance with the Kent, et all study in Pediatrics.  Right off the 
bat they confuse ACCURACY with DEPENDABILITY.  The two are not the same.  We all 
have biorhythms with many of the biologically measurable fluctuations in our bodies.  If 
you measure any given indicator, even height, you will get a different result at different 
times of the day.  If I remember correctly you shrink a cm from when you get in the 
morning until you go to bed at night.  That does not mean that the instrument or tool is 
inaccurate -- it means it is measuring the actual fluctuation.  

Ditto for feeding.  Some cultures feed infants on cue throughout the day and nights, some 
cultures push schedules that interfere with following an infant's cues.  This does not mean 
that the measurement is inaccurate.  It means that you must consider the dependability 
of the indicator throughout the day by taking into account this fluctuation.

The last time I reviewed a study, everyone who posted on the topic on Lactnet, including 
myself, missed the glaring fact staring us right in the face in the abstract that the authors 
were not questioning ACCURACY -- they actually claimed that the indicator was 
ACCURATE.  Instead they questioned the PRECISION.  And then the completely failed to 
measure PRECISION.  The only way to measure precision is to keep doing the 
measurements with the same instrument over and over again.  

Sometimes I wonder if peer reviewers have ever had any training in statistics at all.

Susan Burger 

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