[JC Series] Episode 1: Feeling the Heat at Journal Club

Today begins our first episode in our Journal Club Series.

 
In this episode, we'll be introducing the concepts of critical appraisal & EBM and discussing how in the world we're supposed to stay up to date in medicine.

It's impossible to keep up wit hall the literature coming out - over 75 articles, 11 systematic reviews/meta analyses PER DAY. 
 
We're here to help
 
How to keep up? It's impossible by yourself. Evidence based medicine (EBM) is a team sport. We use:
 
 
We LOVE JC because:
  • It helps us to keep up with the latest data in Pulm/CCM
  • Junior clinical staff learn better critical appraisal skills from attendings and senior clinical staff
  • We're able to discuss and decide how to incorporate data into clinical practice
 
Critical Appraisal
  • Basically trashing an article
  • Breaking down key components of data, methods, results, & conclusions
  • Deciding what information needs to be incorporated into practice
  • A difficult skill that needs to be practiced
 
PICO or Foreground questions (population, intervention, control, outcome). What we'll be focusing on in this series
  • Therapy - Does an intervention have a meaningful effect on patient outcomes
  • Harm - very similar to therapy - does a particular variable/disease/intervention cause harm in a given patient population
  • Diagnosis /differential diagnosis - does a particular piece of subjective/objective data have value in diagnosing or ruling out a condition
 
Stay tuned!