You are here

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

XML
Diagnostics
Original article
Does this treatment work for me? The patient’s role in assessing medical care
  1. Duncan V Neuhauser1,
  2. Jennifer Chu2
  1. 1 Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistic, School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
  2. 2 Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Jennifer Chu, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. Mail to Jennifer Chu, 233 East Lancaster Avenue, Suite 101, Ardmore, PA 19003-2321, USA; jchu{at}etoims.com

Abstract

Randomised clinical trials are designed to determine whether a particular treatment is appropriate to make a significant difference to the health of a defined population and to aid its approval for use. For an accurate, cheap and simple assessment to see if a treatment benefits an individual person, all that is needed is a pen, paper, simple pocket calculator and daily recording of a few variables. It requires the ability to read and write and to understand addition and division. Factorial design of experiments is used to show the impact of several variables and their interaction on the person’s health status. An example of a 75-year-old man with an enlarged prostate is used here to illustrate this approach. This person was able to understand and reduce side effects, lower the costs of medication by 83% and improve measured health status by 28%. A multivariate model for this person was then created with about 450 person-days of data.

  • global health
  • reverse innovations
  • accessible
  • diagnostics

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjinnov-2016-000177

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Twitter @stopmusclspain

    • Contributors DVN is the main author. JC is the co-author and did the editing, proofing, reformatting, contributed to the references and is also the corresponding author.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent Obtained.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Data sharing statement All data concerned with this manuscript are available from DVN.

    • Press Release We request a press release