The fact that you can quantify a thing by a given metric doesn't change the subjectivity of the choice. You can measure the amount a drug causes the average user to miss work, or die sooner, or number of missing teeth, or anything, but any combination of these will still always be:
a) missing other relevant metrics
b) representative of one perspective on what is valuable to measure, and what constitutes harm
The idea that any one set of metrics and measurements have more intrinsic truth-value than simply aggregating the internal mental weights of all the relevant experts in the field is just like, your opinion man.
If you want to present an alternate, mathematical model for drug harm and explain and argue for the validity of the choices you make for how to measure harm and how the data was gathered over what time period, etc etc - no one's stopping you.
Comments
The fact that you can quantify a thing by a given metric doesn't change the subjectivity of the choice. You can measure the amount a drug causes the average user to miss work, or die sooner, or number of missing teeth, or anything, but any combination of these will still always be: a) missing other relevant metrics b) representative of one perspective on what is valuable to measure, and what constitutes harm
The idea that any one set of metrics and measurements have more intrinsic truth-value than simply aggregating the internal mental weights of all the relevant experts in the field is just like, your opinion man.
If you want to present an alternate, mathematical model for drug harm and explain and argue for the validity of the choices you make for how to measure harm and how the data was gathered over what time period, etc etc - no one's stopping you.