Evidence-based medicine: useful tools for decision making

What a revolutionary idea!

Jonathan C Craig, Les M Irwig and Martin R Stockler - Evidence-based medicine: useful tools for decision making

# Evidence-based medicine (EBM) integrates clinical experience and patient values with the best available research information.
# There are four steps in incorporating the best available research evidence in decision making: asking answerable questions; accessing the best information; appraising the information for validity and relevance; and applying the information to patient care.
# Applying EBM to individual patients requires drawing up a balance sheet of benefits and harms based on research and individual patient data.
# The most realistic and efficient use of EBM by clinicians at the point of care involves accessing and applying valid and relevant summaries of research evidence (evidence-based guidelines and systematic reviews).
# The future holds promise for improved primary research, better EBM summaries, greater access to these summaries, and better implementation systems for evidence-based practice.
# Computer-assisted decision support tools for clinicians facilitate integration of individual patient data with the best available research data.

I am not mocking the authors. I am mocking the fact that people actually need to be told this.
As this site explains, it's a question of critical thinking. If doctors were properly educated, this would be nothing new.

MIT has a clinical decision-making group.

Google seems yield interesting results.

Robert Hecht-Nielsen presents his theory of cognition: "cogent confabulation"

Robert Hecht-Nielsen presents his theory of cognition

For him, the fundamental mechanism of cognition is what he calls "cogent confabulation":

Hecht-Nielsen noted that the common method used in search engines, data mining and drug trial analysis -- maximum a posteriori probability -- is not the mechanism of cognition. "Humans and animals don't do this," he argued. "Instead, animal cognition maximizes cogency, and in a non-logic environment, cogency maximization implements what I call the 'duck test': if a small animal waddles like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck and flies like a duck, we conclude that it is a duck because that is the conclusion which most strongly supports the probability of the assumed facts being true."

Here is a nice summary about him and his theories.

Has anyone ever written a thesis which only refers to papers that are available online?

Has anyone ever written a thesis which only refers to papers that are available online? This should be a milestone.

proof of mathematical result by non-constructively showing that there must exist a proof of it(?)

Has anyone ever proven a mathematical result by stating that there must exist a proof of it, and proceeding to prove this non-constructively?
i.e., you prove non-constructively that there exists a proof of A.

I've used arguments that there must exist a proof of A because A is dual to A' (in the sense that the axioms are preserved under permutation of, e.g. union and intersection), for which we already have a proof.
But in this case, it's pretty easy to construct the proof of A by applying a transformation on the proof of A'.