If the choice and pursuit of projects and plans is to be deliberate, it must be informed as to the alternatives and their grounds, and this requires intellectual freedoms of speech, association, and press that expand the menu of deliberative options and allow for the vivid representation of the comparative merits of options on that menu.
Decision aids (DAs) are interventions designed to help people make specific and deliberative choices among options by providing information on the options and outcomes relevant to a person's health status (O'Connor et al, 2002).
Decision aids are interventions designed to help people make specific and deliberative choices among options by providing (at minimum) information on the options and outcomes relevant to the person's health status[ 9].
Decision aids are defined by the Cochrane Collaboration[ 33] as "interventions designed to help people make specific and deliberative choices among options by providing (at minimum) information on the options and outcomes relevant to the person's health status".
Patient decision aids (PtDAs) are 'interventions designed to help people make specific and deliberative choices among options (including the status quo) by providing information on the options and outcomes relevant to a person's health status and implicit methods to clarify values' [ 4].
Patient decision aids are "interventions designed to help patients make specific and deliberative choices among options (including the status quo) by providing (at the minimum) information on the options and outcomes relevant to a person's health status and implicit methods to clarify values," in particular values about the benefits and harms of the options [ 8].
We used the definition of the Cochrane Review on decision aids: "interventions designed to help people make specific and deliberative choices among options (including the status quo) by providing (at the minimum) information on the options and outcomes relevant to a person's health status and implicit methods to clarify values" [ 25].
To be eligible for inclusion, we considered studies that evaluated interventions designed to "help people make specific and deliberative choices among options (including the status quo) by providing (at the minimum) information on the options and outcomes relevant to a person's health status and implicit methods to clarify values".
Strong arguments also take place in the right verb tense, with most successful political argumentation being deliberative (debating future options, and thus taking place in the future tense), vs. forensic (usually laying blame -- past tense) or demonstrative (celebrating or bemoaning the current state of things -- present tense).
26 Box 1 Decision aid definition (Reproduced from Stacey et al, p. 8 26 ) "(I nterventions designed to help people make specific and deliberative choices among options (including the status quo), by making the decision explicit and by providing (at the minimum) (a) information on the options and outcomes relevant to a person's health status and (b) implicit methods to clarify values".
