Evidence-Based Medicine Podcast with Dr Dan- Review
A great new podcast on the scene is hosted by Dr Daniel Aronov (AKA Dr Dan) called Evidence Based Medicine and is being subscribed at a rapid rate on itunes. For people who haven't heard of this concept of evidence based medicine before, it’s basically an approach to summarising top-quality research studies to help doctors optimise their clinical decisions.
Dr Daniel Aronov provides listeners with a most entertaining and sometimes humorous, well informed description of the latest randomised controlled studies. He also places these studies in context, and discusses how the studies are impacting on current clinical practice, and the latest professional guidelines.
It's a fantastic resource for busy doctors, especially GPs, who are pretty unlikely to ever dig out the original randomised controlled trials unless they happen to be academics linked in with a university.
I immediately was engaged to hear about the latest studies which impact on the decisions that I make with my patients- for example, the core question for GPs about how low to target blood pressure control in their patients. It's not all whiz bang high tech medicine either. For instance, Daniel looks at some recent evidence around best treatment for warts.
One really insightful aspect of the podcast is that it doesn't just report the upside of treatments, but carefully looks at the side effects and complications. For example, getting blood pressure really low may be great to reduce heart disease but what's it doing to our patients’ kidneys?
Daniel also provides many insights which doctors don't usually get from the professional guidelines. For example, the number needed to treat is a technical term which gives doctors and patients a sense of how effective a treatment really is and how many people would need to be treated to actually achieve a benefit for one patient. It's enlightening to realise that some of the claims of drug companies actually relate to tiny percent improvements for our patients.
There are some moments in the early podcasts where some of the technical terms and numbers get a bit overwhelming for the uninitiated, but it sounds like Daniel is tightening up his complexity budget for listeners as the podcasts evolve! A lot of the nitty gritty numbers are migrating on to the accompanying show pages, so this will only improve listenability.
family doctor.expert wishes Daniel lots of success with these podcasts and will be listening with interest to this great new podcast- a wonderful resource for doctors and for enthusiastic patients who want to go to the original source of evidence regarding their treatments.