Evidence based medicine: hormones, parachutes and Ebola

This month we are happy to welcome Dr. Ben Cooper to Bangkok Scientifique to talk about evidence-based medicine. That might seem like a bit of a stretch - after all, isn't all medicine evidence-based? In fact, far from it. Despite the amazing advancements that medicine has seen in the previous decades, we probably all know someone who has made a medical decision based on advice from a fortune teller or astrological signs, or has tried to cure a headache using reiki crystals, or enlarge their breasts by slapping them (true story (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2039764/Thai-breast-slapping-therapist-claims-hitting-boobs-makes-bigger.html)).

To put it shortly, evidence-based medicine emphasizes the use of evidence from well designed and conducted research in healthcare decision-making, and promotes the use of formal, explicit methods to analyze evidence and make it available to decision makers. This sometimes clashes with some of the more popular medical advice: Does drinking coffee prevent dementia? Do vaccines cause autism? Can vitamin supplements help prevent cancer? The talk will be about how we answer questions like these. How do we infer causality in medicine (or anything else)?

Amongst other things, Dr. Cooper will cover why (almost) everything you read about science in the papers is wrong, why epidemiologits got it so wrong about hormone replacement therapy, how we should evaluate experiment Ebola treatments, new approaches to answering questions about causality, and of course, why we shouldn't use parachutes.

Dr. Ben Cooper works for the Nuffield Department of Medicine at Oxford University and has been part of the mathematical and economic modelling team at the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok since 2010. His work uses mathematical modelling and statistical techniques to help understand infectious disease dynamics and evaluate potential control measures. The main focus of his current work is in developing more effective strategies for using antibiotics in resource-limited hospital settings. Previous projects have included developing models to understand the spread of SARS and pandemic influenza and, recently (in collaboration with HITAP, Thailand’s Health Technology and Intervention Assessment Program), a model-based evaluation and cost-effectiveness analysis of seasonal influenza vaccination of children in Thailand.