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 […]
Category: archimedes
Let me tell you a story … journal clubs as literary criticism
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.. […]
Subjective = meaningless.
So, that’s a deliberately provocative title (which I was assured by a friend in social marketing was a good way to generate blog traffic) … but it’s vaguely accurate. Does subjective = meaningless? […]
Breath deep, breathe hard, breathe long.
I have to admit to being drawn to systematic reviews of things I don’t really understand. So when this editors choice review of ventilator types for neonates sprang up, I did get tempted to look … Now I last did neonates >10 years ago I occasionally wake up, cold sweats, vividly remembering NICU The same […]