Every year when the shops fill with Slade, calendars count down in chocolate to an absence of cereal on the morning of the 25th December and male faces fill with desperation at present buying, my mind slips back to my kitchen, about a decade ago. It’s an unremarkable kitchen, but had in it a large […]
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StatsMiniBlog: Rasch Analysis
Yes. You’re right. I have spelt ‘rash’ wrongly and yes, there are many very very bad puns which can come from this title. But you may have seen, occasionally, Rasch analysis as a thing on scientific paper and wondered ‘Why have they spelled rash wrong?’ Rasch analysis is a way of creating a properly scaled measurement from […]
“And what medicines is he on?”
It was reading a paper describing how sociologists were working with clinical trialists testing a microbiocidal pessary to reduce HIV transmission that got me thinking, again, about how we can lose ourselves in language. The example that stuck with me in the paper was of the understood meanings of the words ‘day’ and ‘month’. When does the […]
Moral conflict and paternalistic thinking
I’ve been reading, Tweeting, FaceBooking and thinking about self-asphyxial behaviours (SAB) for the best part of two weeks, and have driven myself partly potty worrying about the moral implications of my actions and a desire to parent the world. (I should emphasise – very very clearly – that this relates to a systematic review published by the journal before […]
Drained
Compassion fatigue. Burnout. Exhaustion. Call it what you will, many, if not most of us, will at some point – probably many points – crunch into a spell where putting in 110% has left you with nothing but a rattling can. And perhaps a desire for chocolate, gin or trash TV. […]
Keys to success
The challenges of looking after children with complex medical conditions have been widely acknowledged, and a model frequently proposed to address this is of a ‘key worker’ – an identified health care professional who is a point of first contact, organiser and font of locally applicable knowledge to improve care and reduce distress. In the […]
What’s stopping you?
Actually turning the fascinating discussions you all have (I’m sure) over breakfast, beer or bovril about the latest systematic reviews, touching on all elements of critical appraisal from their complex search to their use of mixed logistic regression meta-analysis into action is, sometimes, difficult. We all stop on our course from asking questions, through acquiring […]
Guest Post: “Not the brightest tool in the box…”
Another guest blog from @gourmetpenguin on the topic of clinical academia brings up an EXCELLENT point that’s often assumed, incorrectly. That is that to be a clinical academic, you need to be really clever. Well … I spent a weekend at the Clinical Academic Trainees conference in Sheffield in 2015. This is still quite a […]
Interventions without evidence should not be undertaken. Discuss.
It’s been a ‘debate topic’ from a number of conferences, medical student societies and online fora. Should an intervention without evidence ever be undertaken? There’s a couple of key elements here: one – the idea that there can be an intervention ‘with no evidence’, and two – that an absence of evidence should be interpreted an evidence of absence […]
Re-building pyramids
The idea of the pyramid of evidence – where a systematic review, or even better, a meta-analysis, trumps all below it – is something that’s passed into mythical status in evidence based practice. Actually, mythical is probably a good way of thinking about it. It’s not real, not really real. But it’s not quite truthless […]