Leading article
Community acquired pneumonia
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
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Introduction |
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We live in an era when medical practice is increasingly regulated by guidelines and protocols. Ideally, such guidance should be evidence based, and in particular it is generally recommended that advice on medical treatment should be based on the results of adequately powered, double blind, placebo controlled trials or, some would say, better still, a meta-analysis of several such trials. Unfortunately, evidence of this standard is often lacking, and many guidelines amount to little more than the opinions of the authors.
This is not to say that opinion based guidelines are valueless
the
opinions of experienced clinicians may be better than no opinion at
all. Thus, a significant proportion of the advice contained in the
first edition of the British Thoracic Society Guidelines on asthma
management1 was opinion, rather than evidence based, yet
its publication was followed by a fall in childhood asthma admissions.
This fall might have reflected some
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- Response: Community acquired pneumonia
- Harold Lambert
- ADC Online, 11 Jan 2002 [Full text]
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Child health
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Pneumonia (infectious disease)
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TB and other respiratory infections
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Pneumonia (respiratory medicine)
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Immunology (including allergy)
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