ABSTRACT
LEARNING ABOUT ASSESSING THE QUALITY OF RESEARCH Introduction At its core, the medical literature is similar to other types of literature; there is a ‘narrator’ (the authors), a target audience, and the story of how the research was conducted. That story is either believable or not. That’s what this chapter is about. Although we mention the standardized ways that ‘evidence’ is graded, it is equally reasonable to view a research study as a story. One of the problems with the medical literature is the ‘narrator’ is often a pharmaceutical company with a profit motive, which changes the way the story is told. This is often called ‘spin.’ The story is often simply, but subtly made up by changing the initial primary outcome measure to other outcome measures1 – storytelling with a social purpose, just like we mentioned in chapter one on ‘narrative.’ By understanding medical literature from this perspective, it levels the playing field and facilitates the task of integrating narrative medicine and evidence based medicine – the two stories have to be understood within their respective frameworks and then a larger story created by including the two perspectives. That is what we mean by ‘integrating.’ Keep this concept in mind as you read this chapter, but for learning purposes, we will present the ‘standard EBM concepts’ before tackling the more difficult task of creating a co-constructed narrative.
