It's time for another #CriticalAppraisalThursday CAT!
I meant to do this weekly but phew December was not the month to start that! I'll pick back up now. Here's my first thread and I'll reply with today's topic AND an apology! Wow!

Today's topic: journal club!

A journal club is like a book club, but you discuss a paper instead. It can be a fun and social way to integrate both continuing education and critical appraisal.
Pre-pandemic, physicians and academics would often host a journal club in their homes, with food and drink. Students and residents enjoyed attending journal clubs for the social element and the food and drink as well as the learning and critical appraisal elements.
Due to the pandemic, some journal clubs have moved online. You may be able to seek out an online journal club if this is of interest to you.

The research methods and conclusions of the paper are critiqued during journal club. You don't just accept the paper as correct.
Even though many papers examined during a journal club would be published in peer-reviewed journals - peer-review does not catch all problems, inconsistencies, errors, etc. in a paper.
There is an informal journal club happening right now, thanks to @Wikisteff pulling some data from a paper and examining it closely!

Now, I need to apologize. In my first thread, I linked to critical appraisal tools from the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford.

It's a source I was taught to use a decade ago. I liked their critical appraisal tools...EBM from Oxford, should be okay, right?
Now I can see how these errors get made. I assumed what I was taught was a trusted source, was still a trusted source without verifying.

I didn't realize that Carl Heneghan is the director of CEBM. He's on the board of Collateral Global and listed as a contributor to Brownstone
AKA GBD. Tom Jefferson is also listed as a contributor with Brownstone Institute.

These are powerful groups with funding that are pretty vociferously against non-pharmacological interventions.
I'm grateful to know of these connections now, but really sad to see that EBM is being used in this way and by these groups to perpetuate harm in the world and to mislead people and governments into failing to protect people.
So, here's an alternate source for critical appraisal tools.

The Joanna Briggs Institute is now known as JBI.

They're based out of Australia but have a presence worldwide.

Here are their evidence-based practice resources including critical appraisal: jbi.global/ebp
Their critical appraisal checklists are helpful since they also provide an explanation of why one is evaluating that particular question.

I hope their institute is more scrupulous than CEBM.
For a published article that explains and contextualizes related EBM shortcomings (and possible solutions), please see: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35853682/

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