Viva la Evidence!

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• Format Videos
• Language/s English
• Target Audience Schools, Further education, Self-directed learning
• EBM Stage 0 - Why EBM?
• Duration <5 mins
• Difficulty Intermediate

Key Concepts addressed

• 2-3g Statistical significance is not the same as importance
• 2-3b Relative measures of effects can be misleading
• What is the problem and what are the options?
• 2-1a Comparison groups should be similar
• 2-1d People should not know which treatment they get
• 3-2a Do the outcomes measured matter to you?
• 3-1a The clinical problem and treatment options should be clear
• 1-3c Expert opinion is not always right
• 1-2e Comparisons are needed to identify treatment effects
• 1-2f Consider all of the relevant fair comparisons
• 1-2g Common practice is not always evidence-based
• 1-2h Newer is not necessarily better

Details

A brilliant song and video by James McCormack, featured on the Facebook page of our friends at the Association for Evidence-Based Medicine.

This song puts across in under 5 minutes what we aim to achieve in a plethora of books, courses and workshops:  the basics of how to practice EBM and liberate yourself from unwarranted claims about new wonder drugs.

The lyrics cover all of the most important sources of bias in clinical research apart from reporting bias.  They give a good overview of the need for and aims of EBM.

Themes include:

• The importance of evidence-based, as opposed to eminence-based medicine
• The hierarchy of evidence, from case reports up to systematic reviews
• Confusion about competing treatments
• Unwarranted claims about new treatments
• How to be a healthy sceptic
• Forest plots, confidence intervals and statistical significance
• Absolute numbers are preferable to relative ones
• The importance of patients’ values and preferences in shared decision-making
• Questions to ask in critically appraising a study

You can find more of this good stuff on Therapeutics Education