The Rise of Medical Evidence - Jeffrey M. Drazen
Coda Change
English - November 13, 2016 20:00 - 31 minutes - 14.6 MB - ★★★★★ - 77 ratingsMedicine Health & Fitness Science coda care covid19 harris icu carley codachange conference coronavirus critical Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Medicine is powered by knowledge, but how do we know what is true and what is not? How do we deal with uncertainty in a setting where outcomes are not closely related to known variables? For example, although there are a few people who have survived jumping or falling from an airplane at high altitude (http://zidbits.com/2010/12/can-you-survive-a-freefall-without-a-parachute/), it is a rare event. Thus, a test to determine how to prevent death from such a disaster would only take a small number of participants to see if a particular method works. In contrast, when considering a medical condition where a large fraction of people might seemingly "recover" without treatment, such as tuberculosis (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/who104/en/print.html), how does one determine if a treatment is effective? In this talk, I will examine how we gained knowledge about tuberculosis as an example of a disease where a combination of observational scientific findings and clinical trial data are linked to advance knowledge. I will also discuss other examples of clinical trials challenges and the solutions to these challenges.