‘McNamara's’ and Other Fallacies in Dentistry: Part 1

In 1984, Charles Handy, an Anglo-Irish philosopher, wrote a book entitled ‘The Empty Raincoat.’¹ In this elegantly written book, he popularized the phrase ‘The McNamara Fallacy’ although it had been described some years earlier by Daniel Yankelovich (1924–2017).

In essence, a McNamara's fallacy means that it is wrong ‘to make important something which one can measure – rather than measuring the important things’. Anytime something unimportant is measured, and is then claimed to be a valid surrogate for measuring something that really is important, but when that arbitrary measurement does not do that accurately, it is an example of McNamara's fallacy.

Unfortunately, McNamara's fallacies abound in dentistry. The wider context is that over the last 20 years, dentistry, as well as medicine, have both become corrupted by this malign ‘measurement at all costs’ approach. The perverse result of this fetish for measuring something/anything that can be measured easily means that some important, but difficult-to-measure, things in dentistry get ignored.