There are many reasons why we request tests, in medicine. One imaginary patient’s journey picks up a number of them. Take a patient who presents with a painless lump on their arm, who’s tired and a bit pale & washed out. You might send a series of blood tests, including a full blood count to […]
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Time to rename the terrible twos?
There are many phrasings which make me wince. Some of them are obviously pedantry – I inherited a dislike of the phrase “septic screen” from Peter Daish, preferring the more correct “sepsis screen”. Folks who have worked with me could probably list another dozen easy ways to press my buttons. A more recent phrase which […]
View from across the bridge
The photo on the left is from @bad_diabetic, and I think many of you may have seen it by now. It represents a years worth of twice-daily insulin injections. It’s striking, isn’t it? (When you add to that the 5-6 daily load of many regimes, it becomes worse.) Looking from across the bridge, from the […]
StatsMiniBlog: Incidence and Prevalence
There are two relatively simple terms that get splattered about and are sometimes confused and can cause all sorts of difficulties. Incidence – the number of people who develop a condition in a specific period of time. (I think of this a bit like an ‘incident’ – a thing that happened.It probably has the same etymological […]
Different but similar. Life-limiting long-term conditions in children.
One of the great professional joys of a part-time life in or about paediatric palliative care is being made constantly aware of how much there is in the world that I know next to nothing about. (One of the great personal joys is being able to do something that improves a short life, within a multi-professional […]
Boundary spanning in collaborative networks. Asleep yet?
Sometimes you need a massive push to take you beyond a title into reading a paper. (Well, when I say sometimes, I mean ‘most times’. Often, the push can be the patient that has driven you to start looking. Sometimes the push is the grand round or journal club you need to present. Rarely, it’s […]
StatsMiniBlog: ROC plots
A (while ago) we published an explanatory page about ROC plots in the Education and Practice journal. There are a few great reasons why we should replicate it here: 1. So people can read it more easily 2. Because it fits into the stuttering series on diagnostics 3. It saves me having to write the […]
Underpowered and over here.
We’re great fans in the Archimedes blog of trying to get people to think about the meanings and impacts of research, like asking What would Jack want and not believing p-values. One key idea is that of an ‘important clinical difference‘ (see – avoided significantly …) that is essential in working out if a trial is […]
Bronchiolitis. The future? March’s #ADC_JC
So – this blog is the beginning of a rather excellent “Storify” summary of the March’s #ADC_JC which debated an RCT examining the use of heated humidified high-flow nasal cannula (HHHFNC) instead of hypertonic saline (HSS) in the management of bronchiolitis in the emergency department. (For those who don’t know, Storify is a lovely way […]
Guest Blog: When it all backfires
Although vaccines are probably one of the most effective public health interventions to reduce mortality and morbidity, it’s apparent that vaccine ‘scares’, often fueled by mass-media have caused some parents to question their value and safety. Wile we paediatricians try hard to keep vaccination rates up, we don’t know how effective are our messages or […]