How do we know whether a particular drug, therapy or operation really works, and how well? How reliable is the evidence? Are clinical trials truly unbiased? And is current research focused on the real needs of patients? Such timely and pressing questions are raised and addressed in this probing enquiry into modern clinical research, with far-reaching implications for daily medical practice and patient care.

Aimed at both patients and professionals, Testing Treatments builds a lively and thought provoking argument for better, more reliable, more relevant research, with unbiased or ‘fair’ trials, and explains how patients can work with doctors to achieve this vital goal.

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Smart Health Choices: full text now available for free online!

Consumers are often confronted with decisions about their health. These decisions can be challenging: how should one think through all the issues and how should one decide what evidence is believable? Help is now available through a marvelous book, “Smart Health Choices: making sense of health advice” by Prof Les Irwig, Judy Irwig, Dr Lyndal Trevena and Melissa Sweet. An important chapter guides consumers through 5 questions to help structure the decision. These are:

• What will happen if I wait and watch?
• What are my test or treatment options?
• What are the benefits and harms of these options?
• How do the benefits and harms weigh up for me?
• Do I have enough information to make a choice?

Other chapters offer simple tools to decide what evidence is believable.

The Smart Health Choices website gives an overview of the book and links to download free full-text PDFs.

Smart Health Choices can be found for sale via Alibris.