Distinguish between clinical significance and statistical significance as it relates to health care practices?

Answer 1

If medicine were purely a science-based profession, there would be no difference between the two: all significant phenomena would be so because they were proven significant through the scientific method. But medical decisions are often based on non-scientific criteria, and despite that, are often observed to work out for the patients' welfare.

How can this be? This simple answer is that health practitioners (in this context, nurses and physicians primarily) are called upon to take care of people even when lacking information upon which to make a scientifically-informed decision. Sometimes the decision is based on experience accumulated by the profession, but not yet verified scientifically; sometimes the decision is based upon the practitioners own experience and intuition.

We would all prefer that clinical decisions always have a firm scientific foundation, but as a matter of practice, this is not possible today. The gap between what scientists know and what medics must do is narrowing, but it is still wide. Modern society attempts to compensate for this by imposing rather strict standards upon health practitioners. The health professions themselves impose time-tested algorithms and procedures that have been shown to assist in caring for patients, even when science has not defined specific treatments or responses.