This article in the Journal of Medical Ethics was directed at Archi from the Editor of E&P, and has got me all thoughtful about how a simple understanding of statistics is essential to everyone, even those working with the judiciary.

The team writing this study reviewed the decisions of forensic physicians who were determining if the age of adolescents involved in French judicial proceedings for criminal or asylum purposes, looking to see if their decisions were supported by the best quality evidence. more…

It was a vogue around the start of regular antenatal ultrasound scanning to note everything, associate wildly and some up with ‘antenatal markers of disease’, as I recollect. Some of these things turned out to be quite useful (nose bones, for instance, or their absence) and others still confuse me … like the ‘echogenic focus of bowel’ more…

Fast drying, figure hugging and a joy to not iron, lycra (R) has revolutionised my laundry life. There are potentially even greater benefits though, with the use of lycra suits being promoted for children with cerebral palsies. more…

Twitter is a service that spreads news quickly. @archiadc has a challenge: to define key EBM terms in 140 characters or less. Can you help?

Now, I am sadly passionate about constipation and the need to treat it effectively. Some would say this obsession is a bit too much to be healthy. But even I would only go so far as to say that effective evacuation only makes you feel better, rather than make a huge difference to whether you put weight on or not. But perhaps I am not going far enough more…

Now, it’s been a while since I scared myself by visiting a NICU, but I do recall the liberal use of caffeine by the resident medical and nursing staff, both for themselves and their tiny patients. There have been may things said about the delightful methylxanthine (including this, this and this) but did you ever think it could protect neonatal brains as well as keeping them breathing?

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Sometimes, EBM is accused of being slavishly devoted to the Randomised Controlled Trial. This is clearly garbage if you look to answer a question outside of therapeutics: see our Archi posts on diagnosis and prognostication, for example. But even within the setting of picking the right treatment for the patients you see, the RCT is not the only way of seeking after the Truth. (’Heresy’ I hear cried - but it’s not - read on and be delighted or frightened.) more…

If you don’t understand what the title means, you may be delighted to follow on the links below and get all excited about the expanding world of communication where your phone, TV, computer, games console and camera blend into one. If you already understand it, you’re there.

There’s a feed of little messages (tweets) started about EBM, Archi and Paediatrics and we’ll see how it all goes. See twitter.com for more details on Twittering and http://twitter.com/archiadc to start to follow us.

When faced with co-morbidities in paediatrics, many of us need to take a deep breath. It’s not really that often your off-the-street child has more than one diagnosis, is it? (And currently, you can take a 9:1 bet on the diagnosis being ‘bronchiolitis’.) So, when the question of treating a child with ADHD and epilepsy arises, there’s a pair of problems that are faced: more…

We’ve been Archimeding (?sp) for a number of years now, and writing on topics of interest to a range of us. What would you like to read more about? How to understand diagnostic test accuracy? The problems of multiple measurements? The issue of bias in meta-analysis? Where to get quick and trustworthy answers to questions? What to do about drop-outs in studies, or how to use historical controls for comparison? more…