Have you ever been to a journal club and had the slight suspicion that what you are addressing isn’t quite on-target? (Ever been part of #ADC-JC and realised that most of Twitter appears to be whispering at the back and passing notes to each other?) Ever considered if journal club really is a […]
Latest articles
A spoonful of Septrin helps the carinii stay down?
While the diagnosis of Pneumocystis carinii Pneumonia (yes – I know it’s changed it s name – but really, do you ask for Beanz when you want something tomatoey to go with your sausage, egg, black pudding, fried bread, mushrooms and juice in a morning?) may not be everyone’s weekly occurrence, there are probably a handful of […]
Guest Blog: My campaign for free-range consultants
You may not have noticed, but there was a subtle shift in Britain’s food a couple of years ago. After many years of campaigning, most notably on the telly by bucolic chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall but also by such animal welfare luminaries as PETA and Compassion in World Farming, the UK finally got rid of battery […]
StatsMiniBlog: Z scores.
A recent journal club article, the exact nature of which is irrelevant, triggered a coffee-room discussion on the subject of z scores, which although often understood in relation to Bone Mineral Density reports are otherwise a statistical challenge. In particular the difficulties in interpreting them in a meaningful way were lamented by our team. […]
The Cabin of Dr. Ladhani
Hot on the heels of thinking about thresholds for action and inaction comes a really interesting paper looking at the risk of serious infection in children with blood or CSF cultures taken in the South East of England (in 1m – 15y olds). Before going on – what proportion of cultures do you think were […]
Springing into action
If you could get a multiplex PCR result back to you within 2 hours that told you your hot, grumpy, 2 month old patient did not have bacteraemia, would you discontinue antibiotics? How sure would you need to be of that result – 95% certain? 98% certain? 99.5% certain? What – in diagnostic analysis speak […]
Researcher Tips for Children and Young People’s work
We’ve published about academic training in the UK for paediatricians recently, we’ve heard that there is a decrease in the amount of paeds research happening, and we know that there’s stuff floating to push up the political vision of children and young people’s health. We know that we can try to reduce waste by increasing […]
What’s in a name?
A guest post from @tweediatrics. Last week, a discussion surfaced on Twitter regarding the use of “affectionate” names with patients. It started from this, tweeted by an A+E consultant in the UK: “Colleague disciplined for calling a 90 yr old lady ‘my dear’ & ‘darling’. She had no issues with them. Are we being too PC? […]
Gambling, alcohol and division.
No, not an average afternoon at the Houses of Parliament, but another in our diagnostics series. Moving yourself from looking at the predictive values of the tests as evaluated, to taking this information but using it in the situation you face, is a case of Bayesian mathematics. Which sounds hard. But its absolutely what you […]
Positive about predictions
In a previous post I muttered about how unhelpful sensitivity and specificity are to practicing clinicians, and how what we really want to know are the predictive values of a test. Remembering the Table Really diseased Really not diseased Test +ve A B 1.. A/(A+B) Test -ve C D 2.. C/(C+D) 5.. […]