I’ve just received some advance copies of Medical Decision Making, so I’m pleased to report that it exists and will soon be available. It looks very nice, too – Cambridge did a nice job with the production.
Comparative effectiveness and evidence-based medicine
A strange commentary in the Washington Times this week entitled “‘Evidence-based’ Rx miscues” makes claims about evidence-based medicine (EBM): both what the terms means and what it implies for health policy. The author suggests that EBM is equivalent to “one-size-fits-all” medicine that removes physician autonomy in pursuit of a “political imperative to cut costs – […]
Apples, Cheese, and Nudges
“Buy on apples, sell on cheese” is an old proverb among wine merchants. Taking a bite of an apple before tasting wine makes it easier to detect flaws in the wine, and the buyer who does so will not as easily make the mistake of paying more than the wine is worth. Cheese, on the […]
Book available on Amazon for pre-order
Amazon is now listing Medical Decision Making: A Physician’s Guide as available for pre-order, with an expected release date of June 30May 29, 2008! The link is here.
Two stories about testing
A bit of synchronicity strikes, as I come across two different pieces from quite different sources on the question of “even if we have a test that provides probabilities of future health states, do we really want to know?” The first is journalistic. National Public Radio’s program Talk of the Nation did a segment on […]
FLIP on pharmaceuticals
The November 2007 issue of Consumer Reports features an article entitled “Treatment traps to avoid.” The article focuses on unnecessary and overused health care treatments (in the United States). One major emphasis of the report is the emphasis on the approval of new drugs and the marketing process for drugs in the U.S. in general, […]
Off to the publisher
Today I transmitted the manuscript for Making Medical Decisions to Cambridge University Press, our publisher. Of course, there’s still copyediting and all sorts of other work to be done before it appears in the bookstores. When a production schedule has been worked out, I’ll update the readers here.
Annual meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making
The 29th annual meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM) will be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA on October 24-27, 2007. All the relevant detail can be found at http://www.smdm.org. This is the meeting to attend if you’re interested in medical decision science; presentations typically focus on clinical applications, methodological advances in decision […]
Ethics and Decision Science
Our book approaches medical decision making primarily from the standpoint of the community of clinicians, behavior scientists, and theorists who focus on the question of “how should decisions be made in order to provide the patient with the greatest health benefit?” Another group of thinkers, including clinicians, philosophers, lawyers, and patient advocates, have asked an […]
Developing diagnostic tests
In many clinical decisions, the most ready source of additional information is diagnostic testing. Diagnostic tests include not only laboratory tests, but other sources of information about diagnosis, such as history and physical examination. Patients (and indeed, many physicians), however, do not understand how diagnostic tests are developed or how to determine the value of […]