Theses

1. Case-control studies can not provide sufficient evidence for the efficacy of early detection of cancer

2. Most women who undergo strong unfavourable health effects of screening for cancer will assume that they have benefited from that screening

3. Do not the same magnitudes appear larger to your sight when near, and smaller when at a distance? They will acknowledge that. And the same holds of thickness and number; also sounds, which are in themselves equal, are greater when near, and lesser when at a distance. They will grant that also. Now suppose happiness to consist in doing or choosing the greater, and in not doing or in avoiding the less, what would be the saving principle of human life? Would not the art of measuring be the saving principle; or would the power of appearance? (Protagoras, 380 BC, Plato)

4. Increasing the frequency of screening for breast cancer (within reasonable limits) results in a less favourable cost-effectiveness, but it improves the ratio of favourable and unfavourable health effects.

5. The decision to define the Dutch mass screening for breast cancer in women of age 70-75 years as an experiment is based on a misunderstanding and is therefore a violation of the law on proper medical treatment (art. 448, bk 7 van het Burgerlijk Wetboek)

6. A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight. (Proverbs 11:1)

7. Medical costs in life years gained by the intervention that is to be evaluated should not be included in the numerator of the cost-effectiveness ratio

8. A general custom of simulation is a vice (Of simulation and dissimulation, in: The essays, Francis Bacon, 1601)

9. More priority for identifying ineffective medical interventions will both improve public health and contribute to cost containment of medical care

10. The current preference for extra life years over better quality in present life years is appropriate

11. Resistance of plants against a particular pathogen is not durable if it results from genes of other species

12. The pressure to publish or perish can lead to undesirable delay in availability of research results

13. Spectacular results are more likely to arise from bad research than from good research

14. The presence of both safer sex promotion material as well as a cigarettes vending machine in the cafe of the COC-Rotterdam is based on wrong priorities

15. The term 'big bang' incorrectly suggests that there was something to hear at the time

16. The high profits made by scientific publishers are being paid by public money through scientific libraries

17. If men will permit themselves to think, as rational beings ought to think, nothing can appear more ridiculous and absurd, exclusive of all moral reflections, than to be at the expense of building navies, filling them with men, and then hauling them into the ocean, to try which can sink each other fastest. Peace, which costs nothing, is attended with infinitely more advantage, than any victory with all its expense. But this, though it best answers the purpose of nations, does not that of court governments, whose habited policy is pretence for taxation, places, and offices (The rights of man, Thomas Paine, 1792)

18. The world is flat