Testing treatments: better research for better healthcare

Testing Treatments provides a thought-provoking argument, and explains how patients can work with doctors to achieve better, more reliable, more relevant research, with unbiased or 'fair' trials.

This book, aimed at both patients and professionals, is freely available here, and raises questions such as How do we know whether a particular drug, therapy or operation really works, and how well? How reliable is the evidence? Are clinical trials truly unbiased? And is current research focused on the real needs of patients?


A downloadable version of this text is available online here and paperback and eBook copies can be purchased from the publisher, Pinter and Martin.

Freely downloadable texts of the 2006 and 2011 editions of Testing Treatments, together with reviews and translations of the first edition, are available here.

Trust it or trash it?

It has been a while since I wrote, but I am doing a PhD on health information literacy and so my efforts have recently been concentrated on that. I have found so many interesting papers and resources, and I do record them on my Netvibes page.

Anyway, one of the resources I have found is the Trust it or trash it? tool, which has been developed by a group calling themselves The Access to Credible Genetics (ATCG) Resource Network. They focus on information quality and completeness for genetic conditions, but the tool can be used to assess the quality of any online resources. It is a simple and easy to follow design, and just makes you think about the provenance of a site before believing its content.