BehindTheMedspeak: The James Lind Library

An interesting website, created by The Library and Information Services Department of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and brought to my attention by my Glasgow correspondent, Financial Times medical columnist Dr. Margaret McCartney.

"Created to help people understand fair tests of treatments in health care. Essays explaining the principles of fair tests are available in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese."

"To illustrate the evolution of fair tests of treatments from 2000 BCE to the present, the James Lind Library contains key passages and images from manuscripts, books and journal articles, many of them accompanied by commentaries, biographies, portraits, and other relevant material."

Another useful resource in this arena is The Cochrane Collaboration, a global network which styles itself "the reliable source of evidence in health care."

Much more than I, Dr. McCartney is an advocate of evidence-based medicine, which uses statistical outcomes as a guide to best practices.

I always end up looking at every individual — especially myself — as a series of one, which puts paid to any consideration of overall efficacy in a large series.

I suspect there is room for both approaches within any individual's practice — it's simply a matter of how much weight one gets vis-à-vis the other.