Absolute versus relative risk, one more time

I would say do read the supplementary material occasionally. Twice now the thing I wanted to know was only in there.

My honest position is that the evidence base for the main compounds is genuinely substantial and the evidence for a great deal else is not.

What helped was somebody explaining confidence intervals to me properly, once, in plain terms, and I have read differently ever since.

My experience is that the group is much better at this than I am alone, because somebody always spots the thing I skimmed.

Something practical: I write three sentences about each paper afterwards and I now have two years of notes I actually refer back to.

What surprised me was how readable most of these are once you stop being intimidated by the first page.

Nothing useful, just that I have been exactly here.

The trial that gets quoted most in general coverage is not the one that answers most of the questions people here actually have.

My favourite session here was the one where we read a paper and concluded it did not support the thing everybody had been citing it for.

Something worth knowing: the follow-up periods in most of what we read are short relative to how long people actually take these things.

I found the funding declarations worth reading, not as an accusation, but because they tell you what question somebody was paying to have answered.

The withdrawal numbers in a trial usually tell you more about tolerability than the tolerability section does.