European Union of Medicine in Assurance and Social Security

Social Security Challenges in Europe

I’m very glad to announce to my readers that an abstract that I have proposed with my colleagues has been accepted and is for now enlisted in the tentative program updated the 12th March 2012. The nineteenth Congress of the European Union of Medicine in Assurance and Social Security will stand this year from the 14th to the 16th of June in Padova, Italia.

The topic will be: Social Security Challenges in Europe and the spectrum of the themes addressed is large:

1. Population and work force challenges in Europe
2. A healthy worker in a healthy workplace
3. Evidence based benefit decisions
4. Return to work: what works?
5. The influence of e-health on healthcare

tentative_program_EUMASS_2012

The pros and the cons of CER

CER or Comparative Effectiveness Research has its defenders and its contradictors.

But first of all, what is the CER?

CER typically products guidelines issued from the comparison of respective harms and benefits of medicines or techniques of cure already marketed and used routinely by health care providers.

Defenders argue that this is the core of an evidence based medicine. Guidelines will save a lot of money by showing the best way to cure efficiently.

Contradictors estimate that this is the best way to sterilise the research and the development of new molecules and new procedures of treatment given that guidelines strictly forbid practitioners to welcome new therapies. Since guidelines decide the best state of the art, why care givers should worry and take the risk to try new therapies?

Beside there is the question of the quality of CER and of its independence with regard of the pharmaceutical industry. We have to keep in mind that independence with regard of industry is not automatically a warrant of quality because industry possesses a real research and development capacity.

If you want to read more on the topic of CER:

http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?llr=nnvp8ocab&v=001lnBTEkB9iIGf1-holfshJ2uO5HHt7bv_cfN7P8B5xhN30LlXJlH5N2zqH28OPX_CLTPZOrH5z5cTwbX7_t2TlQSh-5Y3665YqHu_UxXBaLuY94o52vSG8jlBhL80FJfNkVwNOJPBgvY%3D

 

http://blog.ehesp.fr/blog/tag/comparative-effectiveness-research/

 

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/nichsr/htawebinars/index.html

 

http://www.policymed.com/2011/11/ahrq-national-resource-center-for-academic-detailing.html

 

http://www.policymed.com/2011/03/iom-clinical-practice-guidelines-we-can-trust-but-what-about-the-iom.html

Related articles

• Cleveland Clinic CEO: Comparative effectiveness will ‘chill’ innovation (medcitynews.com)
• On writing a talk about CER and PCMH (medrants.com)

Bad science (part two)

Cover of Bad Science

Look at this incredible video. The man who is talking is a medical practitioner who has become an epidemiologist. He belongs to a Cochrane group. The Cochrane groups chase false evidence-based medicine by reviewing all the published studies on a particular public health issue (like preventive behaviors, cancer screening, pharmaceutical industry lobbying and so on). It’s an awesome one man show made by a Doctor!

Ben Goldacre: Battling Bad Science, posted with vodpod

Related articles

• How do we battle bad science? (laurieanichols.wordpress.com)
• What eight years of writing the Bad Science column have taught me | Ben Goldacre (guardian.co.uk)
• Bad Science (justwritewhite.wordpress.com)

Guideline

Guidelines are so frequent now in the field of the scholarly publishing of health research studies (more than 100 reporting guidelines) that some scientific authors thought it was necessary to write a guideline explicating  how to write a guideline! In one word to make it short : a guideline of guideline. I’m no joking; here is the proof: journal.pmed.1000217. The authors of this guideline on how to develop a guideline are all Anglo-Saxons (Canadian, North American and English). I wonder if such a proposition could have been undertaken by Latin people?

Related articles

• Guidelines That Work: 2 Key Ingredients (hullonline.wordpress.com)