Fivethirtyeight.com has posted an excellent article about nutritional studies, entitled You Can’t Trust What You Read About Nutrition. This is well worth reading and is […]
The Ethics of Deviating From Guidelines
Unfortunately, it is all too common for physicians to proudly and defiantly deviate from national guidelines or accepted practices related to patient care. This may […]
Quote
“A good teacher, like a good entertainer, first must hold his audience’s attention, then he can teach his lesson.” -John Henrik Clarke
How Do I Diagnose A UTI?
Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are commonly over-diagnosed in emergency departments and ambulatory settings. As many as half of all women presumptively treated with a UTI […]
Teaching Adult Learners: Lessons From Yoda
If you know anything about Jedi training, you know that it should start with a youngling and it ends whenever the Jedi has achieved competency in […]
Measuring How Well A Test Works, or How To Find a Hipster
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 […]