Date: October 31, 2008

Time: Noon to 1:00

Title: "Evidence Based Medicine--It's only as good as the evidence!"

Speaker: Jonas H. Ellenberg, PhD
Professor of Biostatistics
Center for Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics
Associate dean for Research Program Development
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

About The Talk:
Wikepedia gives us the following quote from Babbage:” On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" [...] I am not able rightly to comprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”  Babbage, Charles (1864). Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. Longman and Co.

 The “machine” of creation for evidence based medicine is the synthesis of relevant current knowledge, usually from peer reviewed scientific journals.   I will discuss several examples in medicine where the “machine”, having been fed inappropriate or poorly designed studies, nonetheless, produced erroneous results. These results had the cachet of support from a large bibliographic pyramid.

Where: John D. Wiley Conference Center
Room T216, Second Floor, North Tower

For Further Information: Contact Teresa Palumbo at 263-5837 or
palumbo@waisman.wisc.edu

This Seminar Series is partially funded by the John D. Wiley Conference Center Fund, the Friends of the Waisman Center and NIH grant P30 HD003352.