October 08, 2011

Anatomy and the 3rd Reich

UMich DME's own Sabine Hildebrandt has an article:

Hildebrandt (2011) Anatomy in the Third Reich: Careers disrupted by National Socialist Policies. Annals of Anatomy.

Available online now. Read it!

Posted by rbrent at 07:11 AM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2011

Quality of Life, Burnout, Educational Debt, and Medical Knowledge Among Internal Medicine Residents


UMich in medical education! A brand new JAMA article.

Dr. Kolars (with some collegues from Mayo) studied causes of physician distress in residents nationwide. A survey of over 16,000 residents found about 15% of residents were very upset about their lives, about 52% had higher levels of emotional exhaustion. These symptoms were associated with high levels of debt and lower levels of medical knowledge.


West CP, Shanafelt TD, Kolars JC. Quality of life, burnout, educational debt, and medical knowledge among internal medicine residents. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association. 2011;306(9):952–960.

Posted by rbrent at 08:04 AM | Comments (0)

October 22, 2010

How to ensure your paper is rejected by the statistical reviewer


Stratton, I. M., Neil, A. 2004. How to ensure your paper is rejected by the statistical reviewer.
Diabetic Medicine, 22:371-373.

I haven't read it yet, but I'm imagining it's valuable advice wrapped in snarky mathphobia.

Posted by rbrent at 07:21 AM | Comments (0)

September 09, 2010

The Haunting of Medical Journals: How Ghostwriting Sold “HRT”

This is a genuinely creepy article about how private medical education companies are hired by pharmaceutical companies to place positive information about specific therapies into the medical literature. It may be worth a discussion about the possible role of our DME in countering this sort of thing. Do we have the means to help clinicians sort literature wheat from literature chaff? Would Elsivier fund us or sue us for that effort?

Here's the article:

Fugh-Berman AJ, 2010 The Haunting of Medical Journals: How Ghostwriting Sold “HRT”. PLoS Med 7(9): e1000335. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000335

Posted by rbrent at 10:27 AM | Comments (0)

August 31, 2010

An IV for the RCT: using instrumental variables to adjust for treatment contamination in randomised controlled trials

Sussman, JB, Hayward, RA. An IV for the RCT: using instrumental variables to adjust for treatment contamination in randomised controlled trials. BMJ 2010;340:c2073.

Our own Dr. Sussman writes:

"In this article, we describe a simple yet rarely used analytical technique, the "contamination adjusted intention to treat analysis," which complements the intention to treat approach by producing a better estimate of the benefits and harms of receiving a treatment. This method uses the statistical technique of instrumental variable analysis to address contamination."

I'll find a link and post it here...

Posted by rbrent at 05:38 PM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2010

Contextual Errors and Failures in Individualizing Patient Care


Weiner, SJ, Schwartz, A, Weaver, F, Goldberg, J, Yudkowsky, R, Sharma, G, Binns-Calvey, A, Preyss, B, Schapira, MM, Persell, SD, Jacobs, E, Abrams, RI. (2010) Contextual Errors and Failures in Individualizing Patient Care: A Multicenter Study. Annals of Internal Medicine, 153:69--75.

This is worth a read no matter what.

Posted by rbrent at 07:32 AM | Comments (0)

August 13, 2010

Differential item functioning (DIF) analyses of health-related quality of life instruments using logistic regression

Scott et al (2010) Differential item functioning (DIF) analyses of health-related quality of life instruments using logistic regression. Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, 8:81.

Comment if you're interested.

Posted by rbrent at 10:54 PM | Comments (0)