Society for Participatory Medicine
e-patients.net blog
understanding statistics
general, hc's problem list, medical records, policy issues, reforming hc, understanding statistics
Fred Trotter: Data, damn data, and statistics
Why does this blog use the word “damn” so often? A search produces a whopping 38 hits, such as: Fools! Damn fools! And Medical Science (Right, Santa??) Atlantic: Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science “Gimme my damn data!” The stage is being set to enable patient-driven disruptive innovation Lies, Damn Lies And Statistics: Collective Statistical [...]
Read Moree-pts resources, research issues, understanding statistics
e-Patient Training via TED Talk: “Battling Bad Science”
We’ve often said here that when an e-patient wants to be responsible for treatment decisions, it’s essential to know how to evaluate the research about each option. A common mistake is to trust, blindly, news reports about a treatment, or even to trust, blindly, the journal articles that our clinicians read. Ben Goldacre (Twitter @BenGoldacre) [...]
Read Moree-patient stories, end of life, general, patient networks, pts as teachers, understanding statistics
Tami Boehmer: Hope versus statistics
Guest blogger Tami Boehmer shares a recent conversation with e-Patient Dave about the pitfalls of survival statistics and the power of hope. Tami’s blog, “From Incurable to Incredible,” is at www.miraclesurvivors.com. I recently had the honor of speaking with Dave deBronkart, widely known as “e-Patient Dave.” Dave is the leading spokesperson for the e-Patient movement [...]
Read Moregeneral, news & gossip, research issues, trends & principles, understanding statistics
Why Sometimes Health Reporting Should be Done By Journalists
I’m all for citizen journalism, and can even stand the content mills like LiveStrong, who have pimped out their name and brand in order to make a quick buck. But I draw the line with bad reporting and worse, biased representation of the data to prove a point. Case in point — the blood test [...]
Read Morefound on the net, understanding statistics
Richard Smith: Beware journals, especially “top” ones (BMJ blog)
e-Patients who want to collaborate with their physicians, and be responsible for their medical decisions, need to clearly understand what constitutes good evidence. It’s not always easy…
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general, shared decision making, understanding statistics, Why PM
Ellen Hoenig Carlson: Patients Beware – 1 Out of 3 Subject to Hospital Error
This guest post by SPM member Ellen Hoenig Carlson was inspired by a study on the prevalence of medical errors, published in the April issue of Health Affairs. Medical errors are one of the nation’s leading causes of death and injury. The famed 1999 Institute of Medicine study, “To Err Is Human,” estimated that avoidable [...]
Read Moree-pts resources, understanding statistics
e-Patient Beware: Bad Data, Badly Reported
Here’s an interesting (though oddly titled) post by Jon Richman: Lies, Damn Lies and Pharma Social Media Statistics. It is interesting because it beautifully un-packs misreporting on a topic of great interest to e-patients. It is oddly titled because while the pharmaceutical industry is part of his beat, the errors in reporting on surveys he describes [...]
Read Moremedical records, news & gossip, research issues, understanding statistics
“Electronic Health Records Do Not Impact the Quality of Healthcare?”
We’ve recently been talking here about problems with poor study design in clinical trials. A health IT version of this problem raced through the newswires this week while I was on the road. The news coverage was particularly naïve, illustrating our point. I’ll say at the outset that I haven’t corresponded with the study’s authors, and [...]
Read Moreresearch issues, shared decision making, understanding statistics
Why Almost Everything You Hear About Medicine is Wrong (Newsweek)
Update 1/29: in a comment, Gilles Frydman pointed out that Newsweek’s Sharon Begley wrote this article almost two months before the New Yorker piece appeared – and the editors held the article, apparently due to pressure from a pharma advertiser whose product is cited in the article. Here’s a substantially revised version of this post. [...]
Read Moree-pts resources, shared decision making, understanding statistics
Tips for understanding studies (Health News Review)
Update 1/22: this was originally in our “Found on the Net” sidebar, but it’s attracted enough comments that it belongs in the mainstream. I was researching the coverage of statins on Health News Review, the great e-patient resource we’ve often covered, and I stumbled on their page Tips for understanding studies. Good: “does the language [...]
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