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  • David Symes

    A clearly written and well argued account of an appropriate application of the scientific method of enquiry to an emotionally charged area of our lives (and possible avoidable death!).

    I found the examples of (type 1 and type 2) errors – in understanding the results of flawed research – chilling.
    As a result I hope, in the future, to be even more aware of the possible pitfalls and the potential for bias in both the design and reporting of health related research. Thank You.

  • Test

    Another test

  • Anonymous

    We welcome all of your comments and feedback!

  • Anonymous

    Please tell us about useful resources that help explain the importance of testing treatments.

  • http://www.robinmassart.com Robin Massart
  • Amanda

    I like the pictures of content that change on the home page. Is there any way to make these clickable so someone could click through to something that catches their interest as it flashes up?

    Amanda

    • Anonymous

      Thanks Amanda, if you click on the image below the text it links you to the relevant TTextra

  • JD

    I can’t find the link to download the 2nd edition. can you please post it? All I can find is links to the hypertext edition.

  • JD

    Thanks for the link to the download!

  • Andre Tomlin

    Nice to hear the Testing Treatments book recommended by Ben Goldacre on Radio 4 today:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nxh57

  • ThinkWell

    Thanks for this great link, Andre. Interesting to see how the same book can get such a difference reaction! (For anyone else who wants to listen to the review but not the whole programme the discussion starts at 20 minutes.) This website addresses many of the comments of Michelle Paver.

  • Paul Whitehead

    This is a great initiative. Like Andre, I heard about it on Radio 4 yesterday. Ben’s recommendation, although audacious, made a great change from the obscure & tedious books brought to our attention by some of previous guests over the years.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Julie-Shrive/1182320040 Julie Shrive

    If you are getting the right treatment you feel effective you will probably not be here. It is those who need research & more assistance who are found on Forums such as Healthunlocked & one linked to care 2 USA [ Inspire?]
    TPA ?
    Helplines of Charities run by the non medical on corporate remits or a Nurse are a complete waste of time -assistance needs to be given often urgently .

  • Yen-Fu Chen

    Just a few comments in response to a recent query regarding the apparent discrepancy in length between the Chinese and English versions of Testing Treatments (1st edition):

    (1) The Chinese version does not include the cover, Contents and Acknowledgement pages and the foreword by Ben Goldacre (which constitute the first 11 pages of the English version), nor does it include the References, Additional resources and Index (which constitute the last 21 pages of the English version).

    (2) In addition to the difference in font size, the written Chinese text may be more concise (space-wise, although I’m certainly not a linguistic expert…) than the written English text. For these two versions, one page of text in Chinese can cover approximately two and a quarter pages of text in English without losing information. Therefore, taking into account the omission of contents at the front and end of the English version from the Chinese version (as stated above), the number of pages for the Chinese version seems reasonable.

    (3) The only things that appear to be missing from the main text of the Chinese version (that I could identify after a page-by-page comparison) are the text boxes ‘The Which? verdict on health screens’ in Chapter 2 and ‘Two cheers for uncertainty’ in Chapter 4 of the English version. Other headings, text boxes and texts seem to agree well between the two versions. Like any translated work, the Chinese version may have minor loss of fidelity in some sentences, but overall I would have no hesitation to recommend the Chinese version to a Chinese reader, who can always consult the original English version if/when necessary.

    I hope this helps.

  • anoop

    Just a couple of suggestions:

    1. Please change the name from TT extras to “blog”. I don’t think anybody knows what TT extras means. Everyone knows what a blog means.

    2.I would love to see an RSS feed fr the articles. So it is easy to find updates in my google reader. More like a pull technique.

    3.Also a facebook page where people can “like”.So any artcil or updates can be seen in their facebook feed.

    Thanks for all the hard work!

  • Guest

    Just a couple of suggestions:

    1. Please change the name from TT extras to “blog”. I don’t think anybody knows what TT extras means. Everyone knows what a blog means.

    2.I would love to see an RSS feed fr the articles. So it is easy to find updates in my google reader. More like a pull technique

    • Douglas_Badenoch

      Many thanks for these suggestions, which we will take into account. Another think we are looking at is making the linkage between TTextras and the book content a little more direct.

      However, I think it’s a great idea to explicitly provide a blog. The problem is getting people to write it!

      Any volunteers??

      cheers

      Douglas

  • Jose I. Emparanza

    Comment for James McCormack. A good video “Some studies…”. One of the studies cited, the one about salt restriction, could be improved (or removed). In fact in that review, patients were given such an amount of furosemide that everyone would bet that with a salt restriction regime patients will suffer -for sure- a hiponatremia. The authors of the trials included in this review gave in fact 3 or more times the recommended amount of furosemide!!. Aplicability of the conclusions are then flawed. The methodology of the SR is ok, they follow PRISMA, they do anything for a sound paper, except the usual dosage of diuretics…

    • http://twitter.com/medmyths James McCormack

      Hi Jose – thanks so much for your comment – I think about it this way.

      1) There really is no recommended dose of furosemide – the “recommend” dose is the dose that, via titration by the clinician or patient, controls excess fluid/weight – Regardless, they state “approximately two-thirds of patients received furosemide 50 mg twice daily (comparable with a commonly seen 40 mg twice daily dosing in the community)”

      2) Let’s assume that the doses in these studies are higher than those typically seen – how does that “flaw” a study – in my opinion it doesn’t. All that issue does is limit it’s generalizability to people who are on those doses.

      3) Unless there is a relatively well described reason why these specific doses of furosemide somehow were the reason why the people in the salt restriction group had the magnitude seen for increased all cause mortality (RR 1.95, 95% CI 1.66 to 2.29), sudden death (RR 1.72, 95% CI 1.21 to 2.44), death due to HF (RR 2.23, 95% CI 1.77 to 2.81) and HF readmissions (RR 2.10, 95% CI 1.67 to 2.64) I’m not sure that I’m too concerned about the dose of furosemide.

      3) What is presented in this review is the “best” available evidence that we have – “flawed” as it is. Unless there is RCT evidence that salt restriction actually improves outcome I would lean towards using this evidence rather than ignoring it because it is “flawed”. The bottom line is that anyone who recommends salt restriction in HF is doing it based on opinion – the lowest form of evidence and ignoring much higher levels of evidence.

  • Fay Chinnery

    This is a very interesting and useful resource – any plans to introduce it as part of the teaching materials at universities? Medical students may find this very enlightening – get ‘em while they’re young!

    • Douglas_Badenoch

      Hi Fay

      Many thanks for your kind words.

      I completely agree with you, students are absolutely a key group and we’d love to hear your (or anybody else’s) ideas on what we can to do to get TTi onto their radar.

      At the moment we are talking to a broad range of potential users to find out more about how to make TTi useful to them, and this includes educators as well as health professionals, information workers, journalists, bloggers and other groups.

      So now’s the time to tell us what you think!

      cheers

      Douglas

  • Amy Price

    Hi, I love this Testing Treatments website, it has great content and I would blog post excerpts and links on our website. I can’t because older really valuable posts are lost. Same when I want to email someone so they can check it out. For instance I looked for one Post on the benefits of brain training but could not find it even through search. There is very little information via the menus so it discourages repeat visits. You could fix this with a location page where you list everything and not just latest blogs or even with a visible sitemap. Hope this can be fixed but great book to download in multiple languages, thanks for this!