If something is described as ‘reliable’, what springs to mind? Dull but dependable? Solid and sure? It’s a word that gets bandied about with respect to clinical studies and I’ve often won...
Looking backwards, a whole bunch of studies which were undertaken may be seen as either astoundingly obvious, or startlingly pointless. Why on earth, for example, would you want to trial the effe...
https://blogs.bmj.com/adc/2020/11/17/presented-without-context/
There could be a variety of answers to the title drawn from the repertoire of popular music, ranging from a dusting to a life embodied. In the setting of evidence-based medicine … like almost e...
https://blogs.bmj.com/adc/2020/10/27/how-much-of-a-good-thing-do-you-need/
Not-sure-ness … a word sadly missing from the dictionary at the moment … is thick in the air at the moment, like sunseekers on a August beach or beer bottles the morning after a party* Not-su...
https://blogs.bmj.com/adc/2020/09/28/confused-ambiguous-or-uncertain/
The aged among you may be aware wing mirrors in other countries carried a warning .. “Objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are”. Those of a certain persuasion may be un...
https://blogs.bmj.com/adc/2020/08/26/looking-back-and-mistaking-things/
If eleven people say one thing, and a twelfth disagrees, where do we go with the decision? Let us start with a simple question. What if it’s “Are the chips any good at the canteen?” Straigh...
Sat in my garret, I have only the palest of similarities to Virginia Woolf, but a space to think and reflect as the UK pandemic moves on is a definite opportunity. The common description of evide...
It’s when big stuff hits and happens that the machinery of state (or the hospital or household) seems to step up and move fast and effectively to undertake activities it seemed to need months t...
https://blogs.bmj.com/adc/2020/05/20/questioning-the-minutiae/
The novel coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has brought about many changes in what we’ve been doing, some of which might stay and some of which might go. One of the striking things was about how we,...
https://blogs.bmj.com/adc/2020/05/06/dont-panic-dr-mainwaring/
A traditional approach to assuring oneself of quality of a journal article was to look at the reputation of the journal (via the impact factor, perhaps) and an assurance of peer review. The proce...
https://blogs.bmj.com/adc/2020/04/25/the-problems-and-power-of-peer-review/