This text provides practical guidelines on how to make sense of and interpret the evidence that is available, with information on how to avoid straying beyond evidence into conjecture, supposition, and wishful thinking. It covers size, trial design, harm as well as benefit, and health economics and management evidence.
Do you want to know what a parametric test is and when not to perform one? Do you get confused between odds ratios and relative risks? Want to understand the difference between sensitivity and specificity? Would like to find out what the fuss is about Bayes' theorem? Then this book is for you! Physicians need to understand the principles behind medical statistics. They don't need to learn the formula. The software knows it already! This book explains the fundamental concepts of medical statistics so that the learner will become confident in performing the most commonly used statistical tests. Each chapter is rich in anecdotes, illustrations, questions, and answers. Not enough? There is more material online with links to free statistical software, webpages, multimedia content, a practice dataset to get hands-on with data analysis, and a Single Best Answer questionnaire for the exam.
Making Sense of Medical and Healthcare Literature is essential reading for those involved in reading medical literature on a regular basis, interpreting medical statistics, and those who want to understand the evidence-based medicine process. The work provides information on all aspects of interpreting clinical trial results and medical statistics, and encourages the reader to consider potential biases in clinical studies and related literature. The reader can learn about ethical considerations of clinical trials, and how to impart accurate statistical information to the individual patient. The reader is also encouraged throughout to think about the questions they should be asking of the literature they read, and importantly provides a real example of a critically-appraised published journal article. Making Sense of Medical and Healthcare Literature is essential for developing skills in critical appraisal of medical and healthcare literature.
This handy pocket companion provides all the necessary guidance on how to understand medical research publications, read them critically and decide whether the content of those papers is clinically useful in the care of patients. Illustrated throughout with medically relevant examples, the accessible text encompasses all relevant aspects of study design and clinical audit to give a clear framework to support critical reading for the novice and more experienced reader.
This straightforward guide to evidence-based practice helps you to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to challenge practice that is not underpinned by research and to increase your understanding of the processes involved in accessing, appraising, and synthesizing good quality research. Providing a basic introduction to both quantitative and qualitative research, Debra Evans explores how to find out “what works best”, the impact of something, and what requires more research. Readers will also learn the basic rules used in study design and statistics presented in research articles and systematic reviews. Each simply written chapter includes relevant theory, diagrams and tables, case studies, exercises, boxed summaries, and further reading. Packed with examples from practice across the nursing fields and at different levels, this book is essential for nurses – both student and qualified – who want to increase their confidence when it comes to research appraisal and evidence-based practice processes.
The more we know about medicine, the more we realize that many health questions have no one true answer. Realizing this, and thinking carefully about how medicine asks patients to treat their conditions, leads us to some questions. How reliable are the guidelines that might form the basis of doctors’ advice? Is it wrong, after all, to base an approach to medicine on patients’ preferences? And, given that there is often a distance between the treatment a doctor advises and what a patient would like to do, how do we bridge the gap—especially in a health culture of inequality, technical proficiency, and increasing costs? In practical, engaging, narrative-driven chapters about common health conditions that millions of Americans are familiar with—depression and high blood pressure, arthritis and diabetes—Dr. Zackary Berger of Johns Hopkins demystifies the often bewildering disconnect between patients and doctors and asks us all to think more clearly about how best to protect and cure the human body.
Being able to understand and use primary research is essential tool in any scientific career. This book teaches these valuable skills simply and clearly, saving you hours in the long run.
