The Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine provides a scale for stratifying evidence from strongest to weakest on the basis of susceptibility to bias and the quality of study design.
Because many complementary and alternative medicine therapies for autism are based on misguided notions of its cause and lack support from scientifically sound studies, physicians should steer parents away from these practices and toward safe, effective, and evidence-based interventions.
Physicians should not only avoid forming personal relationships with drug reps but must also acquire and apply numeracy skills and information management strategies to critically evaluating drug reps’ information.
Disparities in children’s mental health care could be addressed through expansion of school-based programs via passage of the Mental Health in Schools Act.
This month, AMA Journal of Ethics theme editor Jacquelyn Nestor, a fifth-year MD/PhD student at Hofstra-Northwell School of Medicine, interviewed Allen Buchanan, PhD, about how we can safely explore cutting-edge biomedical enhancements.
The harms of communicating autism risk can be avoided by helping families to understand risk and to distinguish between poor and good sources of scientific information, which should take families’ interests into account.
Efforts are underway to make posttraumatic stress disorder a condition for which the Veterans Administration will authorize coverage for use of service dogs.
J. Brian Szender, MD, MS and Shashikant B. Lele, MD
The estimated reduction in risk of ovarian cancer for any woman undergoing opportunistic removal of the Fallopian tubes is up to 50 percent, but whether removal is more beneficial than ligation has not been established.
Diethylstilbestrol (DES) was widely used in the 1940s to 1960s to prevent pregnancy loss but was later found to be associated with adverse health effects in exposed offspring, underscoring the need for careful evaluation of new therapies.