Treating Numbers

I'm going to have to check out this Evidence-Based Medicine-related site: the Number Needed to Treat, or NNT.

It has some good explanatory material about the statistics involved in calculating whether a treatment is likely to be beneficial or harmful, and quick summaries of various treatments, presented in the form of information on how many patients who use it are helped or harmed, using both percentages and numbers like "one in eight."

There's also a nifty, traffic-light-style code indicating whether the evidence suggest that an intervention is likely to be beneficial, neutral/unknown or harmful.

It seems to be limited by, well, a limited number of interventions covered at the moment, at least as judged by my unsuccessful searches for some of the example conditions we use in our searching-skills classes, but it looks like a cool resource for EBM concepts generally, and for those topics it does cover specifically.

My thanks to GruntDoc, who recommended it.

.