Diagnostic testing keeps coming back to bite Archi, and that’s not just because of a probability-based failure about a small relative and a missed diagnosis of congenital heart disease. No, the problem with diagnostic tests and their use and abuse remains difficult because the methods of research, the quality of research and the consequence of […]
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Natural frequencies “keeping it real”
So, on hearing Matthew Thompson open up a mini-session with natural frequencies my mind turned to the healing power of crystals, and I become acutely concerned that the open-minds approach of the Teaching EBM Conference had gone too far. But this was quashed quickly by his description: […]
Dibbing
Well, the world of EBM teaching has once more benefited from the bilingual brilliance of Amanda Burls [@ajburls for the Tweeterati], in a superb hour-long lecture at the 16th Oxford Conference on Teaching Evidence Based Medicine. Gardening and teaching are not too different, it seems. The role of the facilitator is to encourage growth of […]
Teaching – keep it simple, stupid
Complex stuff can be really hard to teach. So can simple stuff sometimes – like how do you teach someone to wipe their own bum? But here at the 16th International Conference on Teaching Evidence-based Medicine (#tebm2010 to those tweeting) it’s becoming enthusiastically clear that the key elements of teaching anything are the same. […]
Unknowns: known, unknown and uncertain
Along with Rumsfelt, the drug-addled Dr. House and everyone who’s ever sat an exam, we can all recollect times when we know that we don’t know something. And we have times when we know something. And we have times when we learn about something we didn’t know we were unaware of. (Varenicline anyone?) And we […]
Many outcomes give no answer?
Some systematic reviews are confusing. Sometimes this is just poor writing style. Sometimes it’s because the techniques are difficult to grasp (meta-analytic item-response analysis, anyone?) And occasionally it’s because the data don’t seem to add up ‘right’. […]
“It ain’t what you say but the way that you say it”
Known and sung about from 1939 onwards, and beloved of puppy-trainers and parents of toddlers, it’s clear that how we say something is often more important than what we say. And we now know that this is true for how we write down clinical recommendations and indicate the weight of evidence behind them. (When I […]
Squiggly lines and tea leaves
My grannie-in-law knew a lady who would look at your tea leaves and tell you the future (younger readers – see here – tea is not always bagged & tagged). I had a similar experience with a neonatologist who would look at the seismograph attached to a babies head and declare the child needed more […]
It’s how ineffective?
In the last post I discussed the ‘p’ problem (not enuresis, which is subject to an upcoming NICE guideline) but statistical significance is only the first problem in deciding if something actually works. This post takes up the challenge of not just saying that something is likely to work, but just how well it works. […]
What about benefits?
It’s worth taking some time to return to basics every now and again, and one thing that continues to befuddle medics the world over is the issue of ‘statistical significance’. […]