Book2011
Testing Treatments
Evans, Thornton, Chalmers & Glasziou
A plain-language guide to why fair tests of treatments are necessary and how to spot claims that lack them.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Evidence-Based Medicine
How to tell whether a medical claim is supported — the most transferable skill in this domain.
12 topics · 12 curated works
Topics
- 01Foundations & Overviews1
- 02Levels of Evidence1
- 03Randomised Controlled Trials in Medicine1
- 04Systematic Review & Meta-Analysis1
- 05Number Needed to Treat1
- 06Absolute vs Relative Risk1
- 07Publication Bias1
- 08Conflicts of Interest in Research1
- 09Clinical Guidelines1
- 10Shared Decision Making1
- 11Overdiagnosis & Overtreatment1
- 12Reading a Medical Paper1
Reading in Evidence-Based Medicine
12A way in
Start here
No prior grounding assumed.
Testing Treatments
Evans, Thornton, Chalmers & Glasziou · 2011
A plain-language guide to why fair tests of treatments are necessary and how to spot claims that lack them.
+2 more at this level
Then
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Streptomycin Treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis: A Medical Research Council Investigation
Medical Research Council Streptomycin in Tuberculosis Trials Committee · 1948
Reports the first trial to allocate patients by concealed random numbers with blinded assessment of the films, establishing randomisation as the way…
+7 more at this level
Go deeper
Primary sources and full treatments.
An Assessment of Clinically Useful Measures of the Consequences of Treatment
Andreas Laupacis, David L. Sackett & Robin S. Roberts · 1988
Introduces the number needed to treat as a way of expressing a trial's result in a single clinically meaningful number, arguing it communicates a…
12 works
Paper1997
How to Read a Paper: Getting Your Bearings (Deciding What the Paper Is About)
Trisha Greenhalgh
Sets out the first questions a clinician should ask of any paper — what question it addresses, what kind of study it is, and whether that design fits the question — before reading its results at all.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Book2008
Know Your Chances
Steven Woloshin, Lisa M. Schwartz & H. Gilbert Welch
Argues that the same trial result can be made to sound dramatic or trivial depending on whether it is reported as relative or absolute risk, and that patients are rarely told which one they are hearing.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Paper1948
Streptomycin Treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis: A Medical Research Council Investigation
Medical Research Council Streptomycin in Tuberculosis Trials Committee
Reports the first trial to allocate patients by concealed random numbers with blinded assessment of the films, establishing randomisation as the way to separate a drug's effect from the natural course of a disease.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Book1972
Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services
Archibald L. Cochrane
Argues that most medical practice had never been tested by randomised trial, and calls for a systematic, updated summary of trial evidence for every treatment — the idea behind what became the Cochrane Collaboration.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Paper1996
Evidence Based Medicine: What It Is and What It Isn't
Sackett et al.
Defines evidence-based medicine as integrating the best external evidence with individual clinical expertise, explicitly rejecting the caricature that it replaces judgement with a cookbook.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Report2011
Clinical Practice Guidelines We Can Trust
Institute of Medicine
Sets out standards — disclosed conflicts of interest, systematic evidence review, external review — that a clinical guideline must meet before it should be trusted, written after guidelines had drifted from the evidence behind them.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Paper2012
Preventing Overdiagnosis: How to Stop Harming the Healthy
Ray Moynihan, Jenny Doust & David Henry
Argues that expanding disease definitions and more sensitive tests are turning healthy people into patients faster than treatment can benefit them, and calls for evidence of benefit before a diagnostic threshold is lowered.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Paper2012
Shared Decision Making: A Model for Clinical Practice
Glyn Elwyn et al.
Proposes a three-step model — choice talk, option talk, decision talk — for building shared decision making into an ordinary clinical consultation rather than treating it as a separate add-on.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Report2012
Industry Sponsorship and Research Outcome
Andreas Lundh, Sergio Sismondo, Joel Lexchin, Octavian A. Busuioc & Lisa Bero
A Cochrane review finding that industry-sponsored drug and device studies more often report favourable efficacy and safety results than independently funded studies of the same question, and that this cannot be fully explained by differences in study quality.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Paper2022
Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy: Updated Comparisons and Meta-Analyses of Newer Versus Older Trials
Erick H. Turner et al.
Updates a landmark comparison of FDA trial registrations against published journal articles and confirms that negative antidepressant trials continue to go unpublished or get reported as positive, inflating the drugs' apparent effectiveness in the visible literature.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Paper1988
An Assessment of Clinically Useful Measures of the Consequences of Treatment
Andreas Laupacis, David L. Sackett & Robin S. Roberts
Introduces the number needed to treat as a way of expressing a trial's result in a single clinically meaningful number, arguing it communicates a treatment's benefit better than relative risk reduction does.
PaidAdvanced
In order written
1948 – 2022- 1948Streptomycin Treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis: A Medical Research Council InvestigationMedical Research Council Streptomycin in Tuberculosis Trials Committee
- 1972Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health ServicesArchibald L. Cochrane
- 1988An Assessment of Clinically Useful Measures of the Consequences of TreatmentAndreas Laupacis, David L. Sackett & Robin S. Roberts
- 1996Evidence Based Medicine: What It Is and What It Isn'tSackett et al.
- 1997How to Read a Paper: Getting Your Bearings (Deciding What the Paper Is About)Trisha Greenhalgh
- 2008Know Your ChancesSteven Woloshin, Lisa M. Schwartz & H. Gilbert Welch
- 2011Testing TreatmentsEvans, Thornton, Chalmers & Glasziou
- 2011Clinical Practice Guidelines We Can TrustInstitute of Medicine
- 2012Preventing Overdiagnosis: How to Stop Harming the HealthyRay Moynihan, Jenny Doust & David Henry
- 2012Shared Decision Making: A Model for Clinical PracticeGlyn Elwyn et al.
- 2012Industry Sponsorship and Research OutcomeAndreas Lundh, Sergio Sismondo, Joel Lexchin, Octavian A. Busuioc & Lisa Bero
Also covered elsewhere
This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.