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.

Freely downloadable texts of the 2006 and 2011 editions of Testing Treatments, together with reviews and translations of the first edition, are available at www.testingtreatments.org.

Testing Treatments is also available for sale in paperback and eBook versions at Pinter and Martin.

In addition, TT Interactive is being developed to allow more flexible access to the text of the book, and to link to other resources that help to explain and illustrate the principles and messages contained in the book.

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.

Every day we are bombarded by television ads, public service announcements, and media reports warning of dire risks to our health and offering solutions to help us lower those risks. But many of these messages are incomplete, misleading, or exaggerated, leaving the average person misinformed and confused.

Know Your Chances is a lively, accessible, and carefully researched book that can help people sort through this daily barrage by teaching them how to interpret the numbers behind the messages. In clear and simple steps, the authors - all of them physicians and professors at Dartmouth Medical School, New Hampshire, USA - take the mystery out of medical statistics.

By learning to understand medical statistics and knowing what questions to ask, readers will be able to see through the hype and find out what - if any - credible information remains. The book's easy-to-understand charts will help ordinary people put their health concerns into perspective. This short, reader-friendly volume will foster communication between patients and doctors and provide the basic critical-thinking skills needed to navigate today's confusing health landscape.

Full text of Know your chances now available for free download free full-text PDF.

Know your chances can be found for sale via University of California Press.