A Few Excellent References

I thought I would take an opportunity to list here some texts which I find to be of immense help. I highly recommend each of these books.

1. Guyatt G, Rennie D, Meade MO, Cook DJ. Users’ guides to the medical literature: a manual for evidence-based clinical practice. New York, NY; McGraw Hill, 2008.
This is simply the best text there is about evidence-based medicine. I was able to meet two of the authors during my recent visit to McMaster University, and one (Dr. Cook) was a member of the small-group team for which I was a member. This book provides a complete and thorough overview of EBM, from the initial steps of question formulation and literature searching, through understanding articles about therapy, harm, diagnosis and prognosis, and to how to summarize evidence and apply it to practice. This is a peerless text in the field and one that everyone should have in their personal library. I cannot even begin to state how much use I get out of this book.

2. Haneline M. Evidence-based chiropractic practice. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett, 2007.
Dr. Haneline is one of ours, a faculty member at Palmer College of Chiropractic West Campus. His text takes the concepts of the Users’ Guide (above) and applies them directly to chiropractic. He is able to synthesize difficulty concepts, and chooses to discuss the most common of the methods delineated in the text by Guyatt and colleagues. Because he chooses to stick to foundational concepts, this is an excellent text to use in teaching and to introduce yourself to the ideas and concepts of evidence-based care.

3. Peat J, Elliott E, Baur L, Keena V. Scientific writing: easy when you know how. London, UK; BMJ Books, 2002.
There are a number of good texts about effective writing for science, but this text by Peat and colleagues is one of the best I have seen. It provides the reader with information covering every aspect of the publication process, from developing concepts and ideas, to preparing a manuscript and writing it, the peer review process and proper grammar. Though I spent nearly 20 years editing chiropractic journals, I find something new in this text every time I look through it. For the novice writer, this is a great source book to help walk you through the process of preparing a paper for publication.

4. Reynolds G. Presentation zen. Berkely, CA; New Riders, 2008.
I’ve noted this book in an earlier blog post, but I think it bears noting again. The use of PowerPoint is endemic in education, but often people do not more than transfer their lectures onto slides as pure test, and then read them to their class, perhaps while slightly improvising what they say. This text provides a new way to consider how to use PowerPoint in the classroom, so that we all move away from bullet points and headline-style presentations. It inspires creativity in the classroom.

5. Beauchamp T, Childress JF. Principles of biomedical ethics, 5th edition. New York,, NY; Oxford Press, 2001.
Okay, this is near and dear to my heart. But it is simply the foundational text in modern bioethics debate, the text around which nearly the entire discipline swirls, and incredibly influential. Discussions of beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice and autonomy were codified here and have taken center stage in the field of biomedical ethics. One cannot do research without taking a look through this text, and one cannot treat patients without doing the same. A dense read, but essential.