Vaccines and evidence

Salon.com has recently reviewed a new book by pediatrician Dr. Paul Offit on the anti-MMR (and anti-thimerisol) vaccine movement. Back in February this year, a friend of mine wrote to me that she was “on the fence” about vaccinating her infant. As she put it, “Whom are we to believe?…I’d be interested in anything compelling […]

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 […]

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 […]