Sometimes, EBM is accused of being slavishly devoted to the Randomised Controlled Trial. This is clearly garbage if you look to answer a question outside of therapeutics: see our Archi posts on diagnosis and prognostication, for example. But even within the setting of picking the right treatment for the patients you see, the RCT is […]
Category: archimedes
You can now follow us on twitter @archiadc
If you don’t understand what the title means, you may be delighted to follow on the links below and get all excited about the expanding world of communication where your phone, TV, computer, games console and camera blend into one. If you already understand it, you’re there. There’s a feed of little messages (tweets) started […]
Q: Ritalin and epilepsy?
When faced with co-morbidities in paediatrics, many of us need to take a deep breath. It’s not really that often your off-the-street child has more than one diagnosis, is it? (And currently, you can take a 9:1 bet on the diagnosis being ‘bronchiolitis’.) So, when the question of treating a child with ADHD and epilepsy […]
What do you wonder about?
We’ve been Archimeding (?sp) for a number of years now, and writing on topics of interest to a range of us. What would you like to read more about? How to understand diagnostic test accuracy? The problems of multiple measurements? The issue of bias in meta-analysis? Where to get quick and trustworthy answers to questions? […]
Finding the question
It’s one of the tenets of the evidence-based practice process that questions are framed as ‘PICO’: patient, intervention, comparison and outcome. But what happens when the question is bigger than PICO? […]
Q: Pneumothorices and white rabbits?
Not just Alice in Wonderland, it seems, but a bunch of our colleagues are chasing fluffy-tailed bunnies in their treatment of pneumothorax. Oxygen – in high concentrations – is used by some people to treat spontaneous, non-tension, pneumothorax. But why? […]
Should we give tamixofen for pubertal gynaecomastia?
Well, the media has occasional frenzies over the rising tide of male ‘boob jobs’, but to the average paediatrician it’s the rare adolescent that can’t take his T-shirt off because of pubertal breast enlargement that causes real concern. How should such a potentially disabling and yet ultimately short-lived problem be addressed? […]
Monteleukast helps parents feel better
Well, it does, doesn’t it? There’s nothing much you can actually do for recurrent/intermittent viral wheezers, but if you stick them on a few granules of monteleukast in their yoghurt, at least it seems like we’re doing something. Or am I behind the times and there’s great evidence of it’s effectiveness? […]
Where did I leave that data?
Data can be lost or go missing for lots of different reasons, and it’s quite important to know why as it might make you fundamentally muck-up the results of your study of you deal with it badly. The most obvious reason for data to get lost is by bad luck, for example a freak accident […]
Treating penicillin-resistant pneumococci with penicillin
Now if you ask me, the idea of treating a penicillin-resistant organism with penicillin seems faintly ridiculous… like an iron with drawing pins on the sole plate. Either the bug is resistant (which to me means it resists dying when I use the drug) or it isn’t (so it will die) but it seems that […]