Quote:
Originally Posted by 11Ber
I have argued this several times with a general physician/professor in my college program because he still recommends high flow O2 and 2L NS. I have presented the studies I have found with no effect. I will put several of the O2 studies below.
Pre-Hospital O2 in trauma: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15379072 |
When you use a study to try and justify the way you are practicing, you have to do it cautiously. There are several things you have to consider, of which I will just point out a few here.
Does the study make sense? Is it plausible? Are you really going to withhold oxygen on your patients because of a single database-mining study where no benefit was found? Or is it more likely that the authors were not able to cone down to enough fine detail in the database to identify the patients whom supplemental oxygen helped?
And what if it is only of _minor_ benefit in these patients? Does it cause any harm? (Anyone who is getting ready to repeat that old wives tale about COPDers please sit down and be quiet). If an intervention is cheap, does not cause any harm, and _might_ contribute some benefit, then you would be quite foolish to discard it based on a single retropective study published in a third-tier journal...
Another question you have to ask when practicing "evidence-based medicine" is: does this data apply to MY patient? I will leave this point as an exercise for you - please go back and look at that abstract you linked to, and see what patient population the author explicitly said his conclusion does not apply to....