Recently I attended the launch of a King’s Fund paper in the rarefied setting of Portcullis House, an annex of the Palace of Westminster. The subject was “Bringing together physical and mental health: A new frontier for integrated care.” A panel that included Presidents of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Psychiatrists, was chaired by a […]
Category: BMJ Clinical Evidence
Kamal R Mahtani: Beware evidence “spin”: an important source of bias in the reporting of clinical research
Does the name Malcolm Tucker ring a bell? The Malcolm Tucker I am referring to is the fictional character from the BBC political satire The Thick of it. Tucker (played by Peter Capaldi) was a government director of communications, skilled in propaganda, more specifically in the art of “spinning” unfavorable information into a more complimentary, […]
Emily Sena: Too many drugs, too few medicines—the translational failure of animal research
374 interventions have been reported to be effective in experimental stroke; 97 were tested in clinical trials but only one of these was shown to be effective. The principle of drug development goes that if a therapy improves outcome in animals the next step is to test it in humans in a clinical trial, with […]
Peter C Gøtzsche: Prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death
Our prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer (1). Based on the best research I could find, I have estimated that psychiatric drugs alone are also the third major killer (2), mainly because antidepressants kill many elderly people through falls (3). This tells us that the system we […]
Jon Brassey: Threats to traditional systematic reviews
For many years systematic reviews have been placed on a pedestal, relatively free from critical scrutiny. Frequently seen as being at the top of the “evidence pyramid” they have been adopted as the main way of assessing the worth of an individual intervention. More recently threats to the pre-eminence of systematic reviews have come from multiple […]
William Cayley: Whither the communication of evidence in the social media world?
Notwithstanding the epistemological inconsistency inherent in discussions of “my evidence” vs “your evidence” (after all, if “evidence” is not about an objectively verifiable shared reality, then it’s not evidence”), I appreciate the call by Douglas Badenoch and André Tomlin to “dramatically improve the way important new evidence is communicated to the people who need it […]
Victor Montori: Transforming the communication of evidence for better health
In the run up to Evidence Live 2016, we are running a series of blogs by the conference speakers discussing what they will be talking about at the conference. The main job is to care for the patient. Evidence based medicine makes use of an adjectival phrase, “evidence based,” to note that this is a […]
Evidence Live 2016: Whither evidence in the social media world?
In the run up to Evidence Live 2016, we are running a series of blogs by the conference speakers discussing what they will be talking about at the conference. The tired old trope of “my evidence” vs “your evidence” is endlessly rehearsed on the social media discussions and comments sections. Powerful groups—both corporate and voluntary—deploy […]
Evidence Live 2016: Promoting informed healthcare choices by helping people assess treatment claims
Iain Chalmers, Paul Glasziou, Douglas Badenoch, Patricia Atkinson, Astrid Austvoll-Dahlgren, and Andy Oxman. In the run up to Evidence Live 2016, we are running a series of blogs by the conference speakers discussing what they will be talking about at the conference. All of us are bombarded by treatment claims. These reach us through the […]
Trish Groves and David Moher: How to get published
In the run up to Evidence Live 2016, we are running a series of blogs by the conference speakers discussing what they will be talking about at the conference. The highlight of last year’s excellent Evidence Live was, for me (Trish Groves), a short, private conversation. Two doctors from Pakistan (a husband and wife) sought […]