["Scoring"--benefits and pitfalls].

Problems of calculations and predictions on more than two particles moving are known in mathematics and physics since a long time already. However in medicine as there is lack of knowledge about the complexity of the pathophysiological behaviour of "systems" doctors tend to invent scores, scales and indices to make parameters more intelligible to them without concern on underlying interdependencies and redundancies. There is nothing to say against this kind of proceeding as long as the resulting data are not processed statistically. However, since the personal computer was invented there was and especially today is no need to summarize data any longer to gain the degree of understanding, in the contrary, the only data that really count are those that are processed correctly according to statistics, and thus doctors do not have to keep an eye any longer on incomplete intermediate results.