There’s an issue with EBM. It’s that it relies on the best available evidence. So what if the best evidence is deliberately obscured, hidden behind a paywall, or subject to the precursor to publication bias (“can’t be arsed” bias, where the folk performing an investigation don’t have the motivation to write up, present, and submit their work for publication). […]
Category: archimedes
Guest Post: Ten pitfalls of small group teaching
A guest blog post from Nadine McCrea Recently I had the pleasure of facilitating an evening seminar on small group teaching. We had a lot of fun, spending most of the time having discussions and undertaking tasks in a variety of bizarrely named set-ups (snowballing anyone?). We identified that small group teaching provides huge […]
Is sim training enough?
In a new article in the ADC a group of authors from Liverpool, UK, have examined the retention of newborn resuscitation skills following a simulation-based training programme (NLS – Newborn Life Support). They undertook extensive follow-up of participants and turned up ‘on the job’ and re-examinined the health care professionals at their place of work. They showed […]
So what is the difference between PubMed and Medline?
For quite a while now I’ve been convinced that for practical, non-academic research purposes PubMed is the best primary database to use. (I’m also convinced you shouldn’t be using it unless 1. You’ve checked a summary site like www.tripdatabase.com first or 2. Your speciality is so specialised that you’ve never found anything useful doing this […]
Think systems.
So this is a quick video introduction to a theme we’ll be visiting on & off, probably forever, about the psychology of cognition — how we think — and how this affects our medical decisions. This link came from Neil Maskrey via the EBH listserv, and if you’ve not seen it before watch it with […]
How the internet has changed things
I remember a time when doing EBM required a trip to the hospital library, because that was the only place with a 6-CD changer that held Medline. Behind the table with The Computer on it was the start of a bank of bookshelves that held the Index Medicus – printed Medline – and enough dust […]
Another use for ultrasound
Back in the days when junior doctors worked a 1:3 (1:2 when one of you decided to go on holiday), there were only two dieuretics and antibiotics used to kill bacteria, we learned our trade by hard graft. I (honestly) can’t remember the number of lumbar punctures I’ve performed, but I am aware that it’s […]
GRADE it.
As mentioned quite some time ago, there are a number of ways of approaching the ideas of indicating the strength of evidence behind recommendations. Archi has stuck with a rather old, but easy-to-follow version from the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in Oxford. During the decade of Archi’s existence there’s been the steady development of […]
Another brick out of the wall.
Unpopular things are tricky, aren’t they. Like saying “Abstinence programmes for sex education don’t help reduce unwanted pregnancy” or “dummy use in babies reduced SIDS and didn’t really cause funny teeth “. Here’s another one – breast feeding probably doesn’t reduce obesity rates in later childhood. The results of an 11 year follow up of […]
Credit where it’s due – fanfares for negative results
We’ve mentioned before the use of trial registries and the need to publish all trials, and also the trouble with trying to get negative stuff out into press. Archi would like to hand out a gold star in this regard. […]