This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Mark E. Shaw
Cleveland, Ohio

JAMA. 1993;269(10):1249-1250.

	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.

—The critical appraisal of 37.0°C (98.6°F) by Mackowiak et al¹ is a welcome examination of a health paradigm. Given the authors' comments about the challenges that Wunderlich had in measuring body temperature compared with today, it would be amazing if his conclusions were in fact exactly correct. I therefore applaud the authors' initiative to reopen this subject. However, I believe the authors have not come to statistically valid conclusions because of inappropriate sample size.

In order to determine appropriate sample size when estimating the mean of anything there are at least two questions to consider: (1) How close do we want the estimate to be to the true value (eg, the true mean temperature ±0.05°F)? and (2) How much confidence do we want to place in the estimated mean (eg, do we want to be 90%, 95%, or 99% certain)? If we assume that human body . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?