So, in the dark and cold climes of an early Northern Spring, Archi has been assailed by questions of vitamin D. There are, it is claimed, near-miraculous things from Vitamin D sufficiency – less cancer, less heart disease, less rickets. Well, I’ll buy the last one, but the others? And does any child really need […]
Category: archimedes
Hurtful or helpful?
When you’re thinking about applying the results of a clinical trial, its’ often difficult to get a meaningful handle on the balance that should be made between the beneficial and adverse effects of a treatment. If the medicine gives pain relief from your laparotomy to 1 extra patient in every three that take it (NNT=3), […]
When they cough and puke on you.
It could be pertussis, couldn’t it? (Or just too much cheap vodka.) But if you think this little, spluttering, blueish babe before you has whooping cough, what can you do to make the diagnosis before the pernasal swab has had its merry 48-96 hours to be turned around? Lymphocytosis – that’s meant to be good […]
Sorry for the delay ..
.. but Archimedes has been busy with patients, holidays, work and the like. But back to service again now – I hope. Anyone had any clinical questions recently? […]
Diagnostic tests: as easy as I, II, III
Diagnostic testing keeps coming back to bite Archi, and that’s not just because of a probability-based failure about a small relative and a missed diagnosis of congenital heart disease. No, the problem with diagnostic tests and their use and abuse remains difficult because the methods of research, the quality of research and the consequence of […]
Natural frequencies “keeping it real”
So, on hearing Matthew Thompson open up a mini-session with natural frequencies my mind turned to the healing power of crystals, and I become acutely concerned that the open-minds approach of the Teaching EBM Conference had gone too far. But this was quashed quickly by his description: […]
Dibbing
Well, the world of EBM teaching has once more benefited from the bilingual brilliance of Amanda Burls [@ajburls for the Tweeterati], in a superb hour-long lecture at the 16th Oxford Conference on Teaching Evidence Based Medicine. Gardening and teaching are not too different, it seems. The role of the facilitator is to encourage growth of […]
Teaching – keep it simple, stupid
Complex stuff can be really hard to teach. So can simple stuff sometimes – like how do you teach someone to wipe their own bum? But here at the 16th International Conference on Teaching Evidence-based Medicine (#tebm2010 to those tweeting) it’s becoming enthusiastically clear that the key elements of teaching anything are the same. […]
Unknowns: known, unknown and uncertain
Along with Rumsfelt, the drug-addled Dr. House and everyone who’s ever sat an exam, we can all recollect times when we know that we don’t know something. And we have times when we know something. And we have times when we learn about something we didn’t know we were unaware of. (Varenicline anyone?) And we […]
Many outcomes give no answer?
Some systematic reviews are confusing. Sometimes this is just poor writing style. Sometimes it’s because the techniques are difficult to grasp (meta-analytic item-response analysis, anyone?) And occasionally it’s because the data don’t seem to add up ‘right’. […]