Truth 26. Sorry, Joe Friday. The facts are never “just the facts.”

“Just the facts, ma’am.” The signature line of Dragnet’s hardened detective Sgt. Joe Friday seems straightforward. With all due respect to Friday, nothing could be further from the truth. Data can be twisted and turned and reshuffled. As the old saying goes, if you torture the data long enough, you can get it to confess to anything!

Doctors were performing routine cancer screenings and expensive coronary bypass surgery until they took another look at the statistics. Dr. David Eddy estimated that as few as 15 percent of all medical protocols are actually based on sound data. These are doctors; professionals trained to make rigorous decisions. Do the rest of us have the faintest hope of success?¹⁶