| Summary: | Evidence based medicine is the prevailing paradigm of modern healthcare. However, practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) vary significantly in their ability to appraise and understand modern research. This is the first in a series of articles that introduce the basic knowledge and skills needed to understand academic research and increase awareness of the limitations and problems associated with research methodology and statistical methods. This paper discusses evidence based medicine, bias, the peer review process, abstracts, and takes a detailed look at poor handling of statistical methodology using examples of relative risk, absolute risk and number needed to treat in the context of modern vaccine research.
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