Editorial blogging

It’s been a busy couple of years since I last posted here, as I’ve been engaged in fascinating projects studying physicians’ skills at patient-centered decision making (discovering relevant individual patient life context and tailoring care to fit the patient’s context), perception of risky medical activities, and other work. I’ve also become the editor-in-chief of the […]

Decisões Médicas Baseadas em Evidências

The translation of Medical Decision Making: A Physician’s Guide into Portuguese has been published by Guanabara Koogan SA as Decisões Médicas Baseadas em Evidências (“Medical decisions based on evidence”), which is an interesting spin on the book. Of course, we’re interested in decisions based on values at least as much as evidence, but I can […]

Mammography and decision making

A little history for the non-US readers: the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) is an independent panel that reviews evidence and issues recommendations for preventive health care services. They are sponsored by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) but the panelists are physicians, nurses, and public health researchers employed by universities […]

Helping students unlock the mysteries of Bayes

I am continually impressed by the link between seeing and understanding. This should not be surprising. How often have we had the experience of being told by a student (or colleague) that “I just don’t see it” after our failed attempts to explain a complex concept. If there is a relationship between seeing and understanding […]

Review of MDM:APG

Doody’s Review Service, widely used by medical libraries, now has the first formal review of Medical Decision Making: A Physician’s Guide. Here’s an excerpt: “a thoughtful exposition of the breadth of the medical decision issues to which the analyses of decision theory have often been applied. The authors’ approach to medical decision making ensures that […]

Internet-based decision aids and a new blog

Brian Paciotti’s blog The Internet and the Geography of Medicine came to our attention when he recently published a nice review of some of the current knowledge about patient decision aids, and argued for the development of internet-based tools for medical decision making (full disclosure: he also said nice things about our book, acheter kamagra […]

Decision psychology and swine flu

Behavioral economist (and 2009 President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making) Dan Ariely appeared on NPR’s Marketplace to discuss reasons for the swine flu panic. Read or listen to the interview here. He focuses on the difference between the value of an identified life and a statistical life, as well as the impact […]