Thanks to Kathy Meade who writes the Prostate Cancer Advocacy and Action blog for publicizing this.  (See prostatecancerblog.org.)

You can now sign up for a FREE, high-quality online course on “Evidence-Based Medicine” with materials put together by Johns Hopkins to help you navigate the confounding world of medicine.  The course will help you understand research studies, statistics and cope with information overload.  You can also put this knowledge to good use if you are a prostate cancer advocate or want to become one.  There are six modules (broken up into sections) which you can complete at your pace.  The entire course is a few hours. And there are lots of pictures and cartoons.

“The course is being offered by TRAMS, the public health workforce training management system for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. With a TRAMS account, you are able to participate in online training programs on a wide variety of public health topics.  Registration with the TRAMS system is free.”

http://distance.jhsph.edu/trams/ or prostatecancerblog.org

Some of the topics discussed are how to:

*       Successfully navigate the world of medical information,
*       Critically appraise research studies,
*       Make healthcare choices based on the best available evidence.

The six modules are:

*       Module 1. INTRO: What is evidence-based healthcare and why is it
important?
*       Module 2. ASK: The importance of research questions in evidence
based healthcare.
*       Module 3. ALIGN: Research design, bias and levels of evidence.
*       Module 4. ACQUIRE: Searching for healthcare information. Assessing
harms and benefits.
*       Module 5. APPRAISE: Behind the numbers: Understanding healthcare
statistics. Science, speed and the search for best evidence.
*       Module 6: APPLY: Critical appraisal and making better decisions for
evidence-based healthcare, Determining causality.

Don’t miss out on this.