BMJ Blogs, 15 April 2015
Are you into pimping? More likely you are if you teach. Do read this blogpost on why asking unanswerable questions is no longer the in thing.
BMJ, 31 March 2015
Is paracetamol effective in reducing pain in people with low back pain, or osteoarthritis hip/knee? This meta-analysis with high quality evidence says it is NOT, and suggest revision of treatment guidelines to replace paracetamol with other effective medications.
Archives of PMR, April 2015
614 Is transurethral Botox injection to the sphincter feasible/effective in reducing detrusor sphincter dyssynergy? The Chinese authors got a grant, they could have done a clinical trial but chose to do a descriptive study. #inexplicable. Whose responsibility is it anyway to check if a study quality is worth the money and resources? Trialists, funders, institutional review boards, journal editors, manuscript reviewers are all culprits.
Supplement- S145 Transcranial magnetic stimulation: a magnetic field is applied to the head, and is help repair a few damaged nerves in brain and spinal cord. MARVEL stuff. Just that there isn’t enough, as yet, to suggest transcranial magnetic stimulation actually brings about nerve improvements following spinal cord injury, says this review article.
The April supplement of Archives focuses on such Non-invasive brain stimulation in neurorehabilitation. All “promising” stuff, nothing known to really make a difference.
PLOS, 22 April 2015
Brandishing traditional graphical illustrations in thesis is a die hard tradition. “Beyond Bar and Line Graphs” is a review article. From more than 700 published physiology articles, the authors found most used inaccurate illustrations. They plead researchers to use scatter plots, box plots, histograms to accurately represent continuous data (weight, height, temperature, force…)
JAMA Internal Medicine, April 2015
This hits you hard in the face. In the US, more than 10000 nursing home residents with peripheral arterial disease underwent lower extremity revascularization surgery between 2005 and 2009. Among them, “…few are alive and ambulatory 1 year after surgery. Most who were still alive had gained little, if any, function”. The authors do point out there could have been short term gains (pain relief). Notwithstanding, this is a tale reflecting our times, of how trigger-happy we’ve become. Unmindful of the larger picture.
Still in the habit of starting antibiotics just-in-case in patients with aspiration pneumonitis? You might be causing more harm. This case scenario article in the “less is more” series urges restraint, and differentiating pneumonitis from pneumonia.
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Sometimes #peerreview turns a manuscript into a frankenpaper.
Rehab Journal Review 