Imagine we design a test to detect a disease. In the graph below are 500 patients. Some patients have a positive test result and also have […]
Prenatal Antidepressants and Autism? Mi dispiace!
A new study has been published in the Dec. 14, 2015 issue of JAMA: Pediatrics, which claims a link between prenatal use of antidepressants, particularly in […]
Primer: How To Systematically Read A Scientific Paper
The ability to read scientific literature critically is one of the foundational skills of physicians. The most common way (and perhaps the most wrong way) that […]
How Do I Diagnose Ruptured Membranes? Bayesian Statistics at its Best
The diagnosis of ruptured membranes in pregnancy is clinically very important. Decisions about delivering a pregnancy, hospitalization, and even termination of pregnancies, often depend on […]
Odds Ratios Versus Relative Risk
Many great things have been written about the difference between Odds Ratios (OR) and Relative Risks (RR). Every medical student at some point has been taught […]
Do The NHS Birth Recommendations Have Meaning for The US? Or, The Safety of Home Birth
Recently, The Guardian reported, in an article entitled Low-risk women urged to avoid hospital birth, on the British National Health Service (NHS) urging low-risk pregnant women […]
Power Laws, Decision Making, and Anxiety
Power laws are mathematical relationships used in statistics to describe how a change in one variable affects another variable. A basic power law is illustrated […]
How Should I Do A Cesarean Delivery?
There are billions of ways to do a cesarean delivery. At least 203,843,174,400 ways that I know of (well that’s how many we are going […]
What Should Be Done At The Yearly Visit?
The annual Well-Woman Visit is in need of re-invigoration and redefinition. Unfortunately, in many physicians’ practices and in the minds of many millions of patients, the […]
The Illusion of Causality
Humans seek to explain and understand. We want answers and explanations. Our brains demand it. But our brains have developed many short-cuts to understanding and […]