Cochrane Project: Cooperation to improve medical practice

An inspiring project, very much in the spirit of TIP, involving cooperation, seeking to improve medical practice.

Sri

"Inspired by an Oxford epidemiologist, the volunteers of the Cochrane Collaboration are sifting through mountains of data in search of medicine that works
A decade ago, a small group of epidemiologists and clinicians set out to change medical practice. Their radical notion: Physicians should base treatment decisions on the best available evidence on whether a potential therapy is likely to work. And that evidence, they argued, isn't likely to come from textbooks or a few large, controlled trials. Instead, they reasoned, the best way to see through the mass of data on a specific intervention would be to cull all available studies, give failing marks to any that don't measure up, analyze the rest, and synthesize the results into a single 'systematic review.'

That idea has since blossomed into one of the most ambitious movements in modern medicine. Some 10,000 volunteers around the world are now participating in such reviews, through a loose-knit organization called the Cochrane Collaboration. They have issued 1600 judgments on treatments and procedures, and 1200 more are in the works. They are well on their way to cataloging more than a half-century of clinical trials."