Product Description

Cut Through the Complexities of Medical Studies!

A Doody's Core Title ESSENTIAL PURCHASE!

Enhance your understanding and utilization of the information in medical journals with Stephen Gehlbach's Interpreting the Medical Literature. Written in a clear and entertaining style, this popular guide cuts through the complex language of research studies and makes reading medical publications a rewarding and pleasurable experience.

IMPROVE YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF VITAL RESEARCH

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25576 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 308 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780071437899
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"Gehlbach's forte is his ability to dissect effectively major published articles dealing with common topics. He distills the original data, analyzes strengths and faults, and reduces the authors' message to universally understandable denominators...Interpreting the Medical Literature is about understanding the methodology and logic of scientific inquiry. It teaches interpretational skills needed for understanding medical articles. It has a long and deserving tradition of clarity in discussing research designs. Its inimitable merit is the inclusion and analysis of illustrative examples from major published articles. It is light on jargon, sparing in statistical complexity, and solid in emphasis of the fundamentals. Anyone with trepidations about the complexities of epidemiology and EBM must reach for this gentle book for an auspicious start."--Journal of the American Medical Association (Journal of American Medical Association )

From the Back Cover
INTERPRETING THE MEDICAL LITERATURE, Fourth Edition

GET MORE FROM EVERY JOURNAL YOU READ

Stephen Gehlbach's readable guide enhances the quality of the information you gain every time you sit down to read the medical literature. Interpreting the Medical Literature makes the task of keeping up less daunting. By demystifying the complex language of research studies, this guide makes reading medical literature more palatable, digestible, and profitable.

FIRST CHOICE FOR UNDERSTANDING MEDICAL RESEARCH
* Enhances your ability to interpret medical literature and judge the value and significance of any study
* Makes reading research studies quicker, easier, and more pleasurable
* Hones your analytical skills and gives you the power to judge study design, methods, and meaning
* Clarifies dense, scientific prose
* Simplies statistical analysis
* Offers numerous examples from actual medical literature
* Includes new figures and charts

"The author is highly readable...the book is very well written, organized thoughtfully, and contains many clincal examples." -- Doody's Journal

"An important and welcome text that greatly helps to demystify the epistemology and praxis of biomedical research." -- Journal of Family Practice (on the 2nd Edition)

About the Author
Stephen H. Gehlbach, M.D., M.P.H., is currently Dean of the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Customer Reviews

Good Reference
A statistician might find Gehlbach's explanations a bit too simplistic, but I think it gives a fantastic overview of how to approach interpretation of journal articles. An attending asked us to buy the second edition of this book when I was a 3rd Year med student, and I still use it today teaching residents. He does an excellent job using examples from the literature to illustrate his points. And, unlike other statistical texts, the index can help you grasp topics like the null hypothesis or type I error very quickly.

Great book for medical epidemiology!
I bought this book because I had no training in statistics and was feeling frustrated by having to memorize meaningless things for exams. I mean, that the short term memorization of sensitivity/specificity, prevalence, odds rations, these kinds of things was hard for me and then I would forget what they meant immediately after the exam.

That is not the best way to learn medical stats. So, in despair I looked for a good book to actually learn what is behind the short-hand notation I had been learning. This book actually teaches what it all means! The author is also pretty friendly and funny and I found that his humor was really helpful for absorbing the points he was making. He took the basic information and expanded it, so that now I really do understand the different studies and how to interpret their results. Well, I am no expert but at least I have a decent working knowledge of what is behind a research article. Good book, and it explains things very well.