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That is a point. It has another meaning in that context - science teaching relevant to medicine rather than nuclear physics or botany. It might be that the author is referring to Biomedical Science PhDs but I think not because Biomedical Science in the curriculum sense is only an undergraduate...

What the 'patient-centre' educationalists of today may forget is that in theban old days of the 1970s patient's stories were the centrepiece of an educational session - in those days the Grand Round. The first half of a presentation was the patient's account. This was normally formalised by the...

If you look at his publication list you can see it is the latter dressed up as the former. It is also the new received wisdom for the multidisciplinary team brigade all the way from Guyatt, Glasziou and Garner to Turner-Stokes and the Bristol psychology team. It is a very specific form of...

To be clear, there are two people involved. One is Casper Shoemaker, who is a reasonably ancient paediatric rheumatologist. His gossip is being given blog space by a young NIHR research fellow interested in ethics.

Yes, but I think to be realistic we have to assume that if a PhD student really said this about n=1 rather than doctor Schoemaker dreaming it up they would have assumed that it was in the context of experiments about causation and specifically trials where in general single exceptions - i.e...

We use the term biomedical in the way that people are forced to use the artificial term 'allopathic', invented by the homeopaths, to describe real medicine. I don't know who coined 'biomedical' but I suspect the touchy-feely BPS people - as in 'over-medicalisation'. I have never much liked the...

Ah but is it? If a Dr Who is always some time else then there is no particular Dr Who now.

My experience is that his is not realistic assessment of the scenario. Well designed trials tend not to need very large numbers. In general you only need very large numbers of subjects if the drug hardly works. For drugs that really have a significant useful effect five in each group is enough...

The guy who is quoted on the blog (Casper Schoemaker) is paediatric rheumatologist like Esther Crawley. He is heavily in to patient choice and apparently critical of evidence evaluation by things like GRADE - reminiscent of Turner Stokes I guess. Clearly very much up in the Gordon Guyaltt...

I disagree. In the context that the PhD student was meaning this is exactly what we want. I am pretty sure the student was forced to listen to some drivel put on by the department to illustrate the emotional story of someone cured by CBT. That ought to put anyone off, oughtn't it? What's more...

Where is Dr Who when we need him? Cochrane reports may need a Tardis to be read properly.

We may have to face the fact that flagging things up doesn't achieve much these days. I won't go political but what's on the front pages in the UK seems to show that nobody takes a blind bit of notice of anything. But on the other hand the same forces (mostly internet) may mean that people...

Er what. Caroline is a waste of money - sacrilege. I know you didn't mean it.

Yeah, well, I agree with the title. Not sure that reactions in tissues is a gap in understanding. It was the stock in trade of proper immunology for decades - but maybe people have lost sight of that!

One last vent. To put it another way, this is manipulative, self-righteous gossip.

This is actually a complete fabrication. No clinical epidemiology lecture would teach that a patient's account of their illness was biased. That would make no sense. They would teach that using one patients account as evidence of a causal relation is likely to be biased. The guy recalling this...

To me it is actually quite frightening that the Postgraduate Medical Journal has material like this now. The BPS party line has soaked in to everything. Just as it is frightening that NICE subcontracts to 'Clarity" to give the bullshit to GPs even if the ME/CFS committee got things right.

The Blog is owned by a junior clinical academic working for NIHR (oh yes) who has a special interest in ethics and medicine. This is naive political correctness with bells on I'm afraid.

So I think this actually gives the whole game away. Calling a PhD student biomedical can only come from a BPS freak. I rest my case.

This is intriguing. It seems to highlight how easy it is for us to want our cake and eat it. I am pretty sure that the author in this opinion piece is a staunch BPS type mind. They think that there is too much talk of bias. Haven't we been banging on for years now about not enough talk of bias...