For much of the concert, a screen showed Oscar Wilde and a word balloon with the question, "Who is Morrissey?" That answer has long been clear: He's a musician who has found the equipoise of comfort and discomfort.
In his luminous portrait, dignity and destructiveness find a perfect equipoise.
The obvious point of comparison is the "Lord of the Rings" cycle, based on the work of an almost pathologically learned Oxford don, which has so far found a perfect equipoise of seriousness and delight.
The fact that patients and members of the general public find the concept of randomisation and equipoise perplexing is widely acknowledged [ 15- 17] and advice exists [ 18] which aims to assist in explaining this concept to potential trial participants.
It may be that we will eventually find a better justification for trials than equipoise, but I am not convinced that 'design bias' is a sufficient reason to give up on equipoise just yet.
Trial participants and some members of staff found the concept of equipoise and randomisation challenging and there was discord between the psychosocial nature of the intervention and the predominant bio-medical culture in which the research took place.
A series of studies exploring lay conceptions of the scientific and ethical justifications for random allocation and equipoise showed that while most participants could correctly identify whether or not a method such as tossing a coin was random, they did not find randomisation itself acceptable nor that a clinician would not know which treatment was best (Kerr et al, 2004; Robinson et al, 2004).
One reason for the endurance of George Stevens's film, from 1953, is the supreme equipoise that it finds between two contending impulses — the will to wander, moving restlessly through a desert land, versus the urge to take root, battling for your right to settle down and defying those who would snatch it away.
It has been found that patients' acceptance of equipoise can be unintentionally influenced by how the research is communicated to them [ 18, 20, 21].
Our aim was to include studies that would provide evidence applicable to a general population consuming a diet of commonly found foods and for which equipoise about the intervention existed at the time the study was conducted.
