With very little need to comment – this model of getting research into practice by dr prof Trish Greenhalsh – can be used to slap down anyone who turns to you and claims all you need to get X, Y or Z working is just … You’re welcome. […]
Category: archimedes
Collecting patients’ views
There’s a hugely understandable drive to make health care centre around the person with the health condition and include them in their care, rather than place the focus on the operator of the health machinery or the accountant that balances the cash flows. There’s the recent launch of the Me First! initiative from the UK, for […]
The Emperor’s New Biomarker
Please tell me that I’m not the only one, who hearing about the magical properties of S100, CD64, microbiomology or ILx (where x >8, probably prime, and is instantly forgettable) recalls the scam of the century as told by Hans Christian Andersen in 1837. Well. There may be more to biomarkers of disease than just […]
Getting from the diamond to the drug chart
“Come out of the dark and into the light – use systematic reviews in your clinical practice.” (OK, so that’s probably NOT a direct quote.) It’s been battered on about for a while in this blog that systematic reviews give you – probably – the best idea of if a treatment, diagnostic test or prognostic […]
Clashing concepts
One thing I meet (fairly often) is the clash between the RCT and the patient ‘preference’. (I have to use ‘quotes’ because I know it’s the wrong phrase but I can’t find the right one.) Take an example – topical anaesthesia for accessing implanted central lines in children & young people with cancer. For those who […]
Evidence free yet evidence based; guidelines again.
In a paper that I’d have never seen if it wasn’t for Twitter, Loes Knaapen of the Université de Montréal Public Health Research Institute reports the scholarly musings on a bunch of conversations with ‘EBM’ guideline developers, attendance at conference events, and a lot of reading around the subject of Guideline Creation. At the heart of […]
Sleep tight
Every so often you bump into something that you didn’t know you didn’t know. That might make a massive difference to your (or someone else’s) life. Well recently I was directed at this survival guide encouraging sleep to survive shift working and do it safely and securely. For us. The key points are: […]
But what if you miss a malignancy?
There’s a big push in the UK to make ‘early diagnosis’ of cancer happen more often. The assumption is that diagnosis earlier will mean the disease has not spread, is more treatable, and will lead to a better outcome. For many conditions, the stage at presentation does indeed link to outcome. In some conditions, there’s a […]
Emergency!
That was the repeated phrase of my middle child’s obsessive bedtime reading for a while. Picture of police bikes, fire engines, ambulances, mountain rescue 4×4 and lifeboats. In not one frame was the rescued individual entered into a clinical trial of therapy or diagnostics. I guess that might have been asking a bit much, but […]
Basics: Study Type
So sometimes it’s obvious (the title says “: Randomised Controlled Trial” or “Systematic Review …”) but sometimes it’s just a bit tricky to work out what type of study you’re dealing with. The very clever folks at the AHRQ also had that – and the inconsistency of how researchers name things – and so developed […]