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Christopher Fung, MD; James Lo, MD
Mercy Hospital and Medical Center Chicago

JAMA. 1986;255(11):1437.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

We wish to comment on the survey of Drs Billings and Bernstein¹ concerning physician appreciation of the limitations of laboratory testing in the process of clinical decision making. The authors reapplied with a slight modification the question used by Casscells et al.²

In 1978, we wrote³ in response to the article of Casscells et al that the question they asked in their survey could have more than one correct answer because there were several definitions of false-positive rate. Casscells et al⁴ replied that "we left out many of the details of our interview.... We used the more generally accepted definition of false-positive rate, or ratio, and for good measure equated this result with 95% specificity and 100% sensitivity." Of course, a 5% false-positive rate can be equated with 95% specificity, but not with 100% sensitivity.

In this recent survey by Drs Billings and . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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