There’s a rather neat editorial in BMC Medicine that discusses how academics might better write their papers to inform and influence policy makers. I was taken with how much the tone of this, and the excellent mini-series of blogs on presentation skills by @ffolliett, were similar and applied to all sorts of layers of ‘policy’ making. Take […]
Category: archimedes
Steroids are bad for you. Lifesavingly so.
There are two newish articles on steroids in the Archives – one is a systematic review of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) from short-course use, and one the initial creation of a quality of life tool intended to be used to look at how steroids, particularly dexamathasone, affect the life of those children and young people […]
Realist reviews
There’s a not-so-new kid on the systematic review block that seeks to cogently and comprehensive look at if, why (or why not) an intervention ‘package’ works in practice. They are ‘realist reviews‘ which, in brief, take a slightly different idea to how things work than the standard medical researchers might. The reviews aim to unpick […]
Well I never thought of that …
For no particular reason I can think of I bumped into this RCT of “Intraurethral Lidocaine for Urethral Catheterization in Children: A Randomized Controlled Trial” and thought, initially, “Well that’s a waste of money and effort and quite unreasonably uncomfortable for the poor little things that got un-anesthetised”. (My very first job was on an […]
Moral conflict and paternalistic thinking
I’ve been reading, Tweeting, FaceBooking and thinking about self-asphyxial behaviours (SAB) for the best part of two weeks, and have driven myself partly potty worrying about the moral implications of my actions and a desire to parent the world. (I should emphasise – very very clearly – that this relates to a systematic review published by the journal before […]
What’s stopping you?
Actually turning the fascinating discussions you all have (I’m sure) over breakfast, beer or bovril about the latest systematic reviews, touching on all elements of critical appraisal from their complex search to their use of mixed logistic regression meta-analysis into action is, sometimes, difficult. We all stop on our course from asking questions, through acquiring […]
Interventions without evidence should not be undertaken. Discuss.
It’s been a ‘debate topic’ from a number of conferences, medical student societies and online fora. Should an intervention without evidence ever be undertaken? There’s a couple of key elements here: one – the idea that there can be an intervention ‘with no evidence’, and two – that an absence of evidence should be interpreted an evidence of absence […]
Re-building pyramids
The idea of the pyramid of evidence – where a systematic review, or even better, a meta-analysis, trumps all below it – is something that’s passed into mythical status in evidence based practice. Actually, mythical is probably a good way of thinking about it. It’s not real, not really real. But it’s not quite truthless […]
Messed up references
Those who are writing a thesis, have just upgraded from one bibliographic manager to another, or have spend a week flying around your (ex) region collecting printed forms to tell a prospective employer you are not a danger to their staff, patients or cutlery may read the title one way. Those who have been pondering […]
Triple targets
There’s a triple target that I often splurge about evidence based medicine being the ‘combination of patient preference, clinical expertise and best-available research’ which in context addresses an EBM-is-copying-the-trial critique. The #RealEBM hashtag (go on … give it a go ..) is addressing this quite eloquently and has been graven in stone by the superb @RichardLehman1 in […]