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Dear All, I am providing feed back to the list on the recent EBM sessions I presented to our medical students in the United Arab Emirates. I had requested the list to help with a WWW address from where I could calculate NNT and show it live on screen to the students. Thanks to Professor Sacket and David Badenoch from UK and Paul Glasziou from Australia for advising me on the CATNipper demo software which I down loaded from http://cebm.jr2.ox.ac.uk and showed it on the screen. But it does the calculation of NNT in two steps. First it calculates the EER and CER and then the NNT in the next screen. Students found it useful and we are awaiting for its formal launch. Dr.Jobson, a GP from East Anglia, UK sent me a simple EXcel chart that calculates NNT. I am hoping to use it in one of my next sessions. In yesterday's session for accessing and appraising evidence I used the following example. The students were given this exercise. Class exercise: You are the primary care physician in a health centre and you see quite a few children with head lice. Though different drugs exist for the treatment of head lice you wanted to find an evidence based reply for this clinical problem. How will you go about accessing and appraising the evidence for the same? The students performed a live search using Pubmed on WWW under guidance and came out with relevant articles. Then they were taken to the BMJ web site to access the paper by Dawes et al. Evidence based case report: Treatment for head lice BMJ 1999;318:385-86. The students seems to have got the basics of EBM but the only complaint was why so much importance to head lice in the UK!!!! Finally a question to the members. The students wanted to know when should they look for evidence? Is it for all cases they will see in their practice and are there any guidelines to decide on which of the cases/patients they should hunt for evidence? Any thoughts on the above will be gratefully received and I will relay them to our students. Apologies for the length of this communication. Badri Dr.P.Badrinath M.D.,M.Phil.,(Epid) PhD(Cantab) Assistant Professor and Epidemiologist, Department of Community Medicine, UAE University, PO Box 17666, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates. Tel: 00 971 3 5039 652 mobile:050 6192082 Fax: 00 971 3 672022. [log in to unmask] ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%