Moving on From Self-assessment

PRiMER is moving away from allowing only self-assessment as the primary outcome in educational research. Huzzah! Source: Moving on From Self-assessment

The problem with “reference-based medicine”

Evidence-based medicine as a marketing label has been a problem for a while: https://dnunan79.medium.com/a-study-shows-9a4a76ab5cc5

EPOC is no more…

Learned today that the Cochrane Effective Practice and Organization of Care group is no more, apparently due to a funding decision from its sponsors. I have learned so much about research and evidence-based medicine from this group. I've decided to share the document below just to keep it "out there" - I had a hard …

Who gets bad healthcare?

https://youtube.com/shorts/hEkSzrzfopY?feature=share

xkcd: Health Data

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/health_data.png "Variables are the #1 risk factor for outcomes"Therefore if we just stop all this measurement, we won't see any outcomes... Metrics be damned!

Base rate bias

Linking below to a great blog post (from back in the "good-ol' Delta days") about base-rate bias. This issue came up just this week amongst come colleagues from looking at data from a group with positive COVID-19 tests, comparing their vaccination rates and worrying that vaccines aren't working well any longer...it just ain't so. Vaccine …

Clinical Trials by xkcd

Another quality post...If I had a nickel for every time I've encountered this issue... https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/clinical_trials.png

Vaccine Research – XKCD

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/vaccine_research.png Ha! I wish.

What percentage constitutes “enough” improvement?

Listening to a talk about HIV control... The speaker brings up a goal of "90-90-90" - 90% of the population knows their status, 90% of those are on anti-retrovirals, 90% of those have complete viral suppression. A laudable goal, to be sure, and it would be great for us to get there. But, why 90%? …

What Statistics Can and Can’t Tell Us About Ourselves | The New Yorker

Very good article about statistics and their limitations.  Should be required reading for medical students and health journalists.  Contains my new favorite example (attributed to mathematician Ian Stewart) of the ecological fallacy: The average person has one breast and one testicle. In the era of Big Data, we’ve come to believe that, with enough information, …