Dr. David Newman is a emergency room physician and director of clinical research at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. He founded the website theNNT.com, which aims to give clinicians and patients information about medicines to help them make decisions based on evidence, not biases, habits, or tradition. The NNT, or number needed to treat, is an epidemiological tool that offers a measurement of the effectiveness of a medicine or therapy, by estimating the number of patients that need to be treated in order to have an impact on one person. Dr. Newman's website has a rating system for how likely a drug is to be of help - and also factors in the possible harms and side effects when determining its overall usefulness.
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