Word: particularizes
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Despite restricted access, abortion remains one of the most common surgical procedures in the U.S. for women and, according to the Guttmacher Institute, fewer than 0.3% of patients experience a complication serious enough to require hospitalization. First-trimester abortions in particular are considered extremely safe. After years of debate about breast cancer and abortion, the U.S. National Cancer Institute in February 2003 gathered the world's leading experts to review the data and assess the risk. They stated that their conclusion that "induced abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk"was "well established," the institute...
Increasingly, doctors seeking to provide their patients with the best possible care are exploring what is known as evidence-based medicine--a hard, cold, empirical look at what works, what doesn't and how to distinguish between the two. It's not enough to prove that a particular blood test or CT scan really spots cancer, for example. You also need to know whether early detection of that cancer would make a difference in your ability to respond to treatment or it merely means that you would die at the same point but learn about your illness earlier than...
Guyatt's ideas complemented the work of the Cochrane Collaboration, an international network of researchers, physicians and others that was founded in 1993 to systematically gather and evaluate the knowledge found in medical research. The organization aggregates all published scientific studies on a particular treatment question to get a sense of the field. Then reviewers carefully consider the design of the research to determine just how strong the evidence is. One of their most famous reports was a 2005 finding based on 139 studies showing that there was "no credible evidence" that the vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella...
Researchers can gather all the hard-nosed evidence they want about the effectiveness of a particular drug or treatment. But there's one figure doctors don't much talk about despite its importance. It's called number needed to treat, or NNT, a new measure developed in the past 20 years that's one of the best-kept statistical secrets in medicine...
...idea of NNT is simple enough. Most clinical trials look at how much better people do on a particular medicine compared with how they would do without it or whether they should be on a different medicine. Take statins, drugs that aim to reduce bad cholesterol. A typical trial might give one group of men a statin for, say, five years and give a second group a placebo, or fake pill...