BMJ  2005;330:93 (8 January), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7482.93-b

Letter

Evidence based medicine: does it make a difference?

Numerophobia may be a problem in adopting evidence based medicine...

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—Both the editorial by Del Mar et al and the paper by Straus et al raise important points that must be considered if both medical students and doctors are to be trained successfully in evidence based practice.^{1 2}

Del Mar et al say that epidemiology and statistics are repellent to many doctors. In our experience, neither topic is repellent. However, feedback from medical students at the end of our clinical epidemiology course has consistently raised concerns about the ability of students without A level mathematics (a higher school qualification in the United Kingdom) to cope with the biostatistics component of the course, although no complex mathematical calculations are required. We therefore examined this empirically by comparing the exam performance of such students with that of their peers with A level mathematics and did not find any evidence that they were any less competent, at least as assessed by a . . . [Full text of this article]

Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 2PR y-ben-shlomo@bristol.ac.uk

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    StumbleUpon    Technorati    What's this?

Relevant Articles

Evaluating the teaching of evidence based medicine: conceptual framework

Sharon E Straus, Michael L Green, Douglas S Bell, Robert Badgett, Dave Davis, Martha Gerrity, Eduardo Ortiz, Terrence M Shaneyfelt, Chad Whelan, Rajesh Mangrulkar the Society of General Internal Medicine Evidence-Based Medicine Task Force
BMJ 2004 329: 1029-1032. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Teaching evidence based medicine

Chris Del Mar, Paul Glasziou, and Dan Mayer
BMJ 2004 329: 989-990. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Online poll

Find out more >>