Assessing likelihood ratio of clinical symptoms: handling vagueness.

Clinical symptoms including homeopathic symptoms are often vague. There is reluctance to assess clinical symptoms as diagnostic instruments because they are hard to define. Still, clinical symptoms appear effective in daily practice. Expert systems and neural networks handle vague data successfully. Theoretical considerations predict the kind of problems we may expect. There is a difference between quantitative and qualitative vagueness. Vague data cause problems if we try to prove a hypothesis because of expectation bias. We assess likelihood ratio of homeopathic symptoms only to improve the method.