Medical Journals sometimes publish POEMs-which in this context stands for "Patient Oriented Evidence that Matters". The criteria for a study to be elevated to high level on the epistemological food chain are:
1.addresses a question physician face.
2.has measure(s) of outcome and
3.has the potential to change the way doctors practice.
There are several "medical news newspapers" typically distributed without charge to physicians, one example of which is the " Internal Medicine Report",which I usually read if for no other reason than for the excellent essays by Dr.Philip R. Alper . This type of publication has no shortage of information that you really can't use,as well as some you can , the trick being to know the difference.
Here are some of the "unPOEMs" from that publication.
They reference an case control study from Urology (2005,67:73-79,which noted that risk for BPH was increased by eating more cereal,bread, eggs and poultry while risk was decreased by eating more soup,legumes, cooked veggies and citrus fruit. Try putting this factoid into your practice. Mr. Jones, with your BPH- I would recommend you eat less bread and more soup.
Another reference was to a paper presented at meeting of the American Stroke Association in which patients who had endovascular closure of patent foramen ovale (PFO) has less migraine headache than a comparison group that was treated medically.This was a retrospective,nonrandomized study and recall bias was an obvious issue. Again try and put this "observation" into practice.
In the same issue we also "learn" that Sulfonyluea therapy for type 2 diabetes linked to cancer" and "moderate coffee consumption may keep Type 2 diabetes "at bay".
Many of these factoid unPOEMs derive from case control studies that are correctly described as hypothesis generating studies that sometimes alert researchers to apparent associations that lead them to push on with more definitive techniques and sometimes are just statistical noise dead ends.
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