Are doctors whippersnappers?

I just came across this delightful poem, published by Gilda Radner in the November 17, 1988 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine:

DOCTORS ARE WHIPPERSNAPPERS

Doctors are whippersnappers in ironed white coats
Who spy up your rectums and look down your throats
And press you and poke you with sterilized tools
And stab at solutions that pacify fools.
I used to revere them and do what they said
Till I learned what they learned on was already dead.

Radner G. Doctors are whippersnappers. New England J Med 1988; 319 (2): 1358.

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Interview with Dr. David Sackett, pioneer in evidence-based medicine

Here is an interesting interview from the October 30 issue of The Globe and Mail:
Picard A. ‘When we began, we were almost pariahs’ : A research pioneer [Dr. Dave Sackett] tells André Picard about the battle for evidence-based medicine

Excerpts:  Dave Sackett, a professor emeritus at McMaster University in Hamilton, has been awarded the prestigious Gairdner Wightman Award, which is given to a Canadian who has demonstrated outstanding leadership in medicine   …  Dr. Sackett is a pioneer in the field of clinical epidemiology and evidence-based medicine, which aim to teach health professionals how to separate good research from bad and apply it to the individual needs of their patients. He is also a world expert on the design and implementation of clinical trials  …  I see the Gairdner not as an individual award but as an award for clinical epidemiology and evidence-based medicine. It’s an award for a delightful bunch of talented people and the credit goes to all of them, not to me. So I accept this on their behalf.
More about the recipient

Listen to Dr. David Sackett on “The Agenda” with Steve Paikin

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RSS Feeds for Medical Education Journals

RSS feeds enable us to browse recent issues of journals through our own desktops.  Actually, you can subscribe to RSS feeds for many kinds of materials, including journals, blogs, Twitter accounts and news services. You can even set up RSS feeds to PubMed searches in the new PubMed. Check out this feed to a search on physicians and the pharmaceutical industry.

Definition: Really Simple Syndication (formerly Rich Site Summary and RDF Site Summary), a newsfeed technology  Read more definitions See also Journals: Medical Education

• Academic Medicine
• Advances in Health Sciences Education: Theory & Practice
• BMC Medical Education
• Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions
• Medical Education
• Medical Teacher
• Teaching and Learning in Medicine

The new, improved PubMed

 

On September 30, NCBI mounted the preview site for the redesigned PubMed. When I first looked at it, I thought they had omitted some key resources like the MeSH and Journals Databases. But I think I entered the site just as they were putting it up, and today, on October 1, there are some great features on the site.

Check out this record:  http://preview.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17142167

The default display is now Abstract, with links to the MeSH terms/Publication Types and LinkOut directly below each record. I had heard a rumour that they were going to eliminate the Single Citation Matcher, but apparently there was an uproar among librarians (a terrifying thought) and the feature was retained. There is a simple search and an Advanced Search, and links to the PubMed Tools and More Resources are right on the home page. I think this is an improvement on the current site, where the only way to see MeSH terms is to use the Citation Display. This was not intuitive, and now all users will be able to view the MeSH terms easily.

Read more about the redesign in the September-October 2009 NLM Technical Bulletin.

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Medical Education: Annual JAMA theme issues

 Every September JAMA publishes a theme issue devoted to medical education (available by subscription only). The 2009 issue appears on September 23: 2009

Here are the tables of contents of these issues for the past few years:

2008;  2007; 2006; 2005; 2004; 2003; 2002; 2001; 2000 

See also Series or Collections: an index

Check out the free JAMA patient pages.

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Professional medical associations and their relationships with industry (JAMA)

This article was published in JAMA in April 2009:

Rothman DJ, McDonald WJ, Berkowitz CD, Chimonas SC, DeAngelis CD, Hale RW, Nissen SE, Osborn JE, Scully JH Jr, Thomson GE, Wofsy D. Professional medical associations and their relationships with industry: a proposal for controlling conflict of interest. JAMA 2009 Apr 1;301(13):1367-72.

Professional medical associations (PMAs) play an essential role in defining and advancing health care standards. Their conferences, continuing medical education courses, practice guidelines, definitions of ethical norms, and public advocacy positions carry great weight with physicians and the public. Because many PMAs receive extensive funding from pharmaceutical and device companies, it is crucial that their guidelines manage both real and perceived conflict of interests. … The recommendations are rigorous and would require many PMAs to transform their mode of operation and perhaps, to forgo valuable activities. To maintain integrity, sacrifice may be required. Nevertheless, these changes are in the best interest of the PMAs, the profession, their members, and the larger society.

The August 19 2009 issue of JAMA includes a number of letters [by subscription only] in response to this article, entitled Industry Support and Professional Medical Associations [scroll down]:

Norman Kahn JAMA. 2009;302(7):737; Peter C. Lombardo JAMA. 2009;302(7):737-738; Walker L. Ray; Robert L. Addleton JAMA. 2009;302(7):738; Robert H. Jackson JAMA. 2009;302(7):738; C. Daniel Smith; Jo Buyske; Mark A. Talamini JAMA. 2009;302(7):738-739; David J. Rothman; Walter J. McDonald JAMA. 2009;302(7):739.

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The new Index to Chiropractic Literature (ICL)

In July 2009 we launched the latest version of ICL – http://www.chiroindex.org. There are many new features, including improvements to the search interface, an Open Access Library, links to RSS feeds for relevant journals, lots of help pages, and a blog. ICL is a high quality product developed and maintained by librarians, and it’s free!

To find out how to search the database and find all the resources on the site, please see the help pages (second menu item from the left). 

See how far we’ve come since 2001!

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The Internet Archive

   Most people now know about the Internet Archive, but it’s always worth a reminder, it’s such a great resource. This is where you can look at Moving Images, Live Music Archive, Audio and Texts and, of course, the Wayback Machine. ( An example from the Live Music Archive:  Grateful Dead Live at Adams Field House, U of Montana on 1974-05-14.)

From the site: The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public. 

Through the Wayback Machine you can track the development of Web sites, back to the mid-90s in some cases:
The Wayback Machine is a 150 billion page web archive with a front end to serve it through the archive.org website.
” … we got a nice letter from the last living director of the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, Gerard Baldwin, because he read about the “fantastic project”. Our Wayback Machine is a tribute to their more cleverly named “Waybac Machine” which in turn was a reference to the Univac. Sherman and Peabody live on.”  Wikipedia entry    Archive of cnn.com

Here are the Internet Archives’ Frequently Asked Questions, and their blog, What’s New at the Internet Archive.

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Elsevier published a fake peer-reviewed journal for Merck

   According to Bob Grant, a blogger for The Scientist,  Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles–most of which presented data favorable to Merck products–that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure.   Read the full blog post.  (Requires free registration.)  More from The Scientist

The journal in question was the Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine, an allegedly peer-reviewed journal created primarily to sell Vioxx and Fosamax to physicians. Summer Johnson, PhD, Executive Managing Editor of the American Journal of Bioethics, has written about these “advertorials in her blog:
Merck Makes Phony Peer-Review Journal (May 1)
Elsevier and Its Many “Advertorials” (May 11)
Another blogger writes: Elsevier has an entire division dedicated to publishing fake advertorial “peer-reviewed” journals

You can read the offending issues online:  volume 2(1) 2003 ;  volume 2(2) 2003

This whole issue was well documented during the May 22 CBC radio show, The Current. See  Part 2: Fake Medical Journals and scroll down to listen to the podcast.

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Conflict of Interest in Medical Research, Education, and Practice (IOM)

  The Institute of Medicine’s report on conflict of interest is now available for purchase or viewing on the IOM’s Web site.  In 2007, the IOM appointed the Committee on Conflict of Interest in Medical Research, Education, and Practice to examine conflicts of interest in medicine and to recommend steps to identify, limit, and manage conflicts of interest without negatively affecting constructive collaborations.

This article was published online in the New England Journal of Medicine on May 1; free full text is available.

Steinbrook R. Controlling Conflict of Interest — Proposals from the Institute of Medicine. N Engl J Med 2009 May 1.

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