Minervation

Testing Treatments interactive: why we need fair tests of treatments, what they look like and how to get involved

Modern medicine has been hugely successful at reducing the impact of disease and increasing life expectancy.

In spite of this, too much medical decision making is based on insufficient evidence. As a result, doctors and other health professionals have sometimes harmed patients instead of helping them.

Avandia box

Avandia was withdrawn after evidence of adverse events mounted up

As recently as 2010, for example, the diabetes drug rosiglitazone (Avandia) was found to have caused serious cardiovascular events such as heart attacks and strokes in spite of being licensed for over 10 years.

How we can prevent these things from happening again is the theme of Testing Treatments interactive (TTi), a family of websites Minervation has produced with an international group of collaborators.

TTi is about how we tell whether one treatment is better than another. In other words, it’s about what constitutes a “fair test” of the effects of treatments.

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CONSORT Library of good reporting

CONSORT Logo

The CONSORT statement is an evidence-based, minimum set of recommendations for reporting RCTs.

You can now get involved in the effort to improve the quality of research reporting by sending examples of good practice to the CONSORT team.

Minervation has just delivered an add-on to their website that allows users to do just that.  Your examples are reviewed by the team and collated in a new section of the website:  the CONSORT Library.

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