Critical thinkingArticle: Dawes, R, M., Faust, D., & Meehl, P, E. (1989)Clinical versus actuarial judgment In the clinical method, the decision maker combines or processes information in his or her head.In the actuarial or statistical method, conclusions rest solely on empirically established relations between data and the condition or event of interest.The actuarial method should not be equated with automated decision rules alone.To be truly actuarial, interpretations must be both automatic (pre-specified or routinised) and based on empirically established relations.Virtually any type of data is amenable to actuarial interpretation.The combination of clinical and actuarial methods offers a third potential judgment strategy, one for which certain viable approaches have been proposed.But, most proposals for clinical-actuarial combination presume that the two judgment methods work together harmoniously and overlook the many situations that require dichotomous choices.Conditions for a fair comparison of the two methods:both methods should base judgments on the same dataone must avoid conditions that can artificially inflate the accuracy of actuarial methods. Actuarial methods seem to have advantages over the clinical method.Although most comparative research in medicine favours the actuarial method...