It’s suggested, often by those who are faced with EBM as a rather coarse stick waved to stop them acting in one way, or to force them to act in another, that practicing EBM destroys any ‘art’ in medicine. I’d argue that it integrates and emphasises the need for art. The three-ringed combination of good […]
Category: archimedes
Populations matter
So, as I occasionally bang on about, I spend a fair bit of time with children and young people with cancer. We do a lot of transfusions of blood components in this population, frequently because we heartlessly pour toxins into them in order to try to kill of their malignancy. We’ve been debating hard recently […]
Basics. Size vs. bias
There’s a beautifully clear explanation behind the BMJ-EBM-journal paywall of a concept I’ve been struggling to express for some time, which is partly there in GRADE and partly grounded in common sense. Take the parachute argument — do you really need an RCT for parachutes (as there are survivors of non-‘chuted falls) — and reductio ad […]
Basics. What is evidence based medicine?
Evidence based medicine – EBM – is a framework for thinking. It’s a process. It’s a method. It’s taking the most unbiased, patient-oriented, clinically relevant research, combining that with the wishes and opinions of the child/young person and family before you and integrating your own skills, expertise and resources to co-produce the most appropriate decision […]
Trial registration. Free, easy and important.
As part of our commitment to the International Committee on Medical Journal Editors, we at the Archives of Diseases in Childhood have supported the idea that all trials with a health-related outcome should be registered before they are undertaken, and made it obligatory for trials in our journal. The reason for this is clear – […]
#TakeoverDay 2013.
Do you know a young person who would want to blog to a worldwide group of children/young people’s clinicians? Run the twitter account of an international journal for a day? Next Friday, 22 November 2013, is the Children’s Takeover Day 2013 in the UK and we at the Archives of Diseases in Childhood, despite the fusty […]
Knowledge translation – making it happen
There’s a really clear and neat idea that researchers do research, which gets published, and clinicians take this and do it in their practice. We know this isn’t true. But how to make the translation from study/publication at the clinic, onto the wards or out into the community is tricky. Prof Trish Greenhalsh gave a really […]
Debating devices
It’s really hard to persuade people that devices need evaluation like drugs do. This might be to do with the physical nature of a device: after all, if you can see the new cannula attachment, or special breathing mask, you know what it’s doing and what it must be making. Or it might be in […]
Before, and after.
In the world of non-randomised studies there are a bucketload of variants, a common one that we see if the ‘before and after study’. This is, on the face of it, a sensible approach. Do your ‘thing’, then change stuff, do the ‘other thing’. Monitor something important you hope to change, and then if it […]
Moving onwards
Not transition this time, but the whole focus of academia. Do we need to shift the everyday focus of research from universities producing complex lab science to every heath care provider being both an intelligent consumer and local producer of relevant research? For instance: which the following spend the greatest proportion of revenue on R&D […]