When people are observed or monitored, their performance is affected – this is the Hawthorne effect in a nutshell. This is regardless of the condition in which they are monitored. Henry A. Landsberger first observed this while analyzing older experiments from 1924-32 conducted in Hawthorne Works, a Chicago electric ... Read More »

The traditional way of replacing a diseased aortic valve is through a stenotomy incision and open heart surgery. When patients are turned down for surgery, they have, until recently, been treated conservatively. Prognosis for this group of patients is very poor with most of them dying within 2 years of presenting. Over the ... Read More »

^{About a poster I presented at WONCA Europe 2011} ... Read More »

The 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza highlighted one of the most significant new tools in tracking epidemics – the Google Flu Trends. Google is one of the most popular search engine used by millions to search for information about anything and everything under the Sun. More and more people are using Google to search for ... Read More »

In the coronary artery bypass (CABG) operation, saphenous vein is harvested from the leg for use as a conduit to bypass stenoses in coronary arteries. This harvesting can be done in 2 ways - open harvest i.e. using an incision that is as long as the length of vein required or endoscopic harvest using a 3cm incision above ... Read More »

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Let me start with a story. Say you went to a fishing trip and desperately want to catch at least one fish to show your friends. What will be the best way to be sure to catch at least one fish? Angling wouldn’t do any good; it’s much too dependent on chance. The best way would be to throw a net. This will ... Read More »

Evaluation of the anatomic tumor response with Computerized Tomography (CT) is the ‘up-to-date’ standard surrogate metric for survival following treatment of solid malignancies and the ideal biomarker for efficacy of investigational medicinal products in “proof of concept” clinical cancer trials. ... Read More »

We recently had this question in a listserv mail.  No, I am not writing about  Schrödinger´s cat. Instead I am writing about evidence.  First I will describe first three definitions: POEMs, CATs and GRADE SoF/EPs and at the end I will try to mix them up and see what you think. POEMs Stands for ... Read More »

The historical consensus that any metastatic stage IV solid malignancy is incurable with devastating 5-year survival rate and pessimistic median overall survival rate still holds true for most of the solid malignancies except for metastatic colon cancer.
Statistics never lie. According to a study published online on ... Read More »