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"path": "/t/dichotomization/26337?page=4#post_78",
"publishedAt": "2026-02-08T16:42:24.000Z",
"site": "https://discourse.datamethods.org",
"textContent": "Beautifully stated. This motivates me to add that an RCT estimates patient _tendencies_ , and unless it’s a 6-period randomized crossover (or similar) design, it cannot estimate effects of treatments on individual patients. The best we can do is to covariate adjust down to a level of detail that current measurements allow, so that we can best predict what the treatment effect will be in certain _types_ of patients in total (group-level estimates for very small groups, e.g., 73 year old males with stage 2 disease at baseline).",
"title": "Dichotomization"
}