The Catalogue of Bias (CoB), is a digital resource for clinicians, students, researchers, investigators, and consumers of health evidence. As of posting this blog, the catalogue has 49 published biases.
This blog is a critical appraisal of a randomized controlled trial examining the effectiveness of different exercises and stretching physiotherapy on pain and movement in patellofemoral pain syndrome.
The EU Trials Tracker, devised by the EBM DataLab at the University of Oxford, tracks which trials on the European Union Clinical Trials Register (EUCTR) have reported their results within a year of completion. Learn more about this tracker and how you need to take action.
GRADE (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation) is a prominent framework for evaluating the effectiveness of systematic reviews. This blog provides detail of the GRADE approach with useful links to further reading on this key process.
A Finnish translation (thank you to Eveliina Ilola) of the nuts and bolts 20 minute tutorial from Tim Hicks: A beginner’s guide to interpreting odds ratios, confidence intervals and p-values.
This is the thirty-fifth blog in a series of 36 blogs explaining 36 key concepts we need to be able to understand to think critically about treatment claims.
The certainty of the evidence (the extent to which the research provides a good indication of the likely effects of treatments) can affect the treatment decisions people make. For example, someone might decide not to use or to pay for a treatment if the certainty of the evidence is low or very low.
This is the twenty-third blog in a series of 36 blogs explaining 36 key concepts we need to be able to understand to think critically about treatment claims.
Many fair comparisons never get published, and outcomes are sometimes left out. Those that do get published are more likely to report favourable results. As a consequence, reliance on published reports sometimes results in the beneficial effects of treatments being overestimated and the adverse effects being underestimated.
This is the twenty-second blog in a series of 36 blogs explaining 36 key concepts we need to be able to understand to think critically about treatment claims.
Even though a comparison of treatments has been published in a prestigious journal, it may not be a fair comparison and the results may not be reliable. Peer review (assessment of a study by others working in the same field) does not guarantee that published studies are reliable. Assessments vary and may not be systematic.
Critical appraisal tools (CATs) are commonly used by students and researchers alike, as a way of judging a study’s quality. In this blog, Dennis Neuen addresses the need to appraise these tools and has also collated a list of 12 CATs from all over the world.
In this blog, Sasha Lawson-Frost explores what moral values underpin or justify the practice of Evidence-Based Medicine, specifically in response to a recent article which stated “the policy side of evidence-based medicine is basically a form of rule utilitarianism”.
This blog, written by Leonard Goh, was the winner of Cochrane Malaysia and Penang Medical College’s recent evidence-based medicine blog writing competition. Leonard has written an insightful and informative piece to answer the question: ‘Evidence-based health practice: a fairytale or reality’.
A pyramid has expressed the idea of hierarchy of medical evidence for so long, that not all evidence is the same. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses have been placed at the top of this pyramid for several good reasons. However, there are several counterarguments to this placement. This blog discusses a new, amended version of the pyramid, proposed in 2016.
This blog introduces Evidology, a group of Mexican students interested in learning more about and promoting evidence-based practice.
This is the third in a series of 34 blogs explaining 34 key concepts we need to be able to understand to think critically about treatment claims.
This blog explains that the fact that a treatment outcome (i.e. a potential benefit or harm) is associated with a treatment does not mean that the treatment caused the outcome.
This is the first in a series of 34 blogs explaining 34 key concepts we need to be able to understand to think critically about treatment claims.
This blog explains that people often exaggerate the benefits of treatments and ignore or downplay potential harms. However, few effective treatments are 100% safe.
Implication: Always consider the possibility that a treatment may have harmful effects.