Testimonial

A testimonial, in the context of evaluating a treatment or other medical or social intervention, is the report of an individual about the success or failure of such an intervention. It is generally considered the weakest level of evidence and is very closely related to using anecdata. Testimonials used as evidence are common in the fields of woo, pseudoscience and alternative medicine, where claims being refuted or supported are somewhat vague and difficult to test. It may also be the case the some people do not wish to have their claims evaluated in a formal analysis.

This page contains too many unsourced statements and needs to be improved.

Testimonial could use some help. Please research the article's assertions. Whatever is credible should be sourced, and what is not should be removed.

Style over substance
Pseudoscience
Popular pseudosciences
Random examples
v - t - e

Usually, the reason for studying a particular treatment is to see if it would work on others. In order to achieve this end, it is necessary to study large numbers of people (a "sample"), ideally in similar circumstances, and who do not know whether or not they are receiving the treatment, after which, one can make a valid prediction as to the effect on a similar, larger "population".

Are testimonials always to be ignored?

Testimonials may provide useful information, but it depends entirely on the context and the nature of the sources of the testimonials. Comments posted on an online message-board should be viewed skeptically - particularly if there's no validation of the identities of the users leaving comments. Such mediums are prone to sock puppetry and astroturfing - whereby those posting positive or negative comments do so with an agenda or with an undeclared interest. Examples of this can be found at online retailing sites, such as Amazon, where users can post reviews of books they've never read - either in support of someone with a shared ideology or as an attack against an author with whom they disagree.

On the other hand an experience relayed by a trusted source may provide useful information but cannot be relied upon in a formal statistical analysis. The experience of one person, while often interesting, does not allow for generalization to others. The experiences of multiple people, as in a list of testimonials, is also invalid, as this is simply a list of individual stories, and not a systematic study.

gollark: Yes.
gollark: We should ban coroutines. Only with strong government regulation can we prevent their misuse.
gollark: It's probably hard to give much help since this will mostly be down to whatever insanity the compiler does.
gollark: C#? This is Lua; are you offloading stuff to a remote server somehow?
gollark: Is trying to move it from multiple coroutines at once a very good idea?

See also
This article is issued from Rationalwiki. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.