In the world of non-randomised studies there are a bucketload of variants, a common one that we see if the ‘before and after study’. This is, on the face of it, a sensible approach. Do your ‘thing’, then change stuff, do the ‘other thing’. Monitor something important you hope to change, and then if it […]
Category: archimedes
Moving onwards
Not transition this time, but the whole focus of academia. Do we need to shift the everyday focus of research from universities producing complex lab science to every heath care provider being both an intelligent consumer and local producer of relevant research? For instance: which the following spend the greatest proportion of revenue on R&D […]
Pilgrimage
Photo from Peter Harrison on Flickr Most communities will have one, two, or more campaigns running to raise money for a child with a health concern. It might be a cancer, a chronic disability or a neurodegenerative condition. The campaign is not for a charity which supports children with the condition in general, or research […]
Where does EBM go without E?
I’ve recently been working with lots of folk who manage children with disability and long-term conditions (LTC), a massive group of heterogenously named conditions with sometime similar and sometimes different problems. The teams working with them are passionate and committed and frequently want to use research. Then they go looking for it. […]
August #ADC_JC – depression and chronic fatigue syndrome
August’s #ADC_JC (twitter journal club) was another lively discussion on this paper by Bould et al. The chat has been storified here – have a read to catch up on the discussion. Our next #ADC_JC will be in September (date to be announced). To keep up to date, follow @ADC_JC on twitter or check out […]
Empathy is good. But does it really make a difference?
There’s been quiet a lot written in the UK recently about failures in an attitude to care within organisations, and how this is a major root cause of poor healthcare and avoidable death. I was wondering about the links between caring, I guessed best expressed as “empathy”, and how patients or their relatives percieved their […]
StatsMiniBlog: Significance tests. Step three.
So, many of you will know that the first rule is that the Doctor lies. The last post might have given you the impression that that was the whole of statistics … but there is a bit more. The first idea that goes beyond the simple question is ‘how are these two continuous variables related […]
A picture is worth a thousand words
We all really already know this. After all, we get taught from day one at medical school that we need to step back and look at the patient, and if anyone’s done any telephone triage, you’re probably aware of the uncomfortable itch that says “I actually want to see this child … not hear about […]
July’s #ADC_JC our twitter journal club – 17th July 8-9pm.
The first Archives of Disease in Childhood twitter journal club was last month and it was a great success. We had around 40 people involved in the hour-long twitter chat (#ADC_JC) – it was engaging and exciting to be involved in an online discussion with so many paediatric health professionals. For July’s #ADC_JC we are […]
Can you actually believe the abstract?
There is a guilty thing that I have to admit doing. Frequently. And that’s just reading the abstract, not the full paper. (Generally this is in scooting through tangential stuff. Honest.) Well in the Journal of Evidence based Medicine, behind our BMJ paywall, is a lovely piece of primary research examining exactly how guilty we […]