Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11723

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Shaughnessy AF.
Clinical Epidemiology: A Basic Science for Clinical Medicine
BMJ 2007 Oct 13; 335:(7623):777
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/short/335/7623/777-a?etoc

Abstract:

While many were learning to “study a study and test a test” in the early 1980s, another approach was developing in a small blue collar town in Ontario, Canada, at a new medical school. Internists calling themselves clinical epidemiologists (and refusing to define clinical epidemiology) were putting together a series of articles for the Canadian Medical Association Journal called “Clinical Epidemiology Rounds.”

The article series was “prepared for those clinicians who are behind in their reading.” The huge success of this series led to the expansion of the concepts in the book Clinical Epidemiology: A Basic Science for Clinical Medicine.

The book emphasises formal probabilistic reasoning as a vital aspect of medical practice. This approach would later turn medicine on its head in what would become the underpinning of “evidence based medicine.” The term is nowhere in the book; it would not be coined until 1991.

The diagnosis section takes . . .

Allen.Shaughnessy@Tufts.edu