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Good Guidelines, Worthless Guidelines

2005· article· en· W2325088048 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueEmergency Medicine News · 2005
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicClinical practice guidelines implementation
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPrideIncentiveCertificationDutyWork (physics)MedicinePsychologyMedical educationPublic relationsPolitical scienceLawEngineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

I agree that there are likely a number of other reasons that physicians don't follow guidelines beyond the ones that I suggested. And I never meant to imply in any way that all guidelines are bad. For example, I think the Ottawa Ankle Rules are probably among the best guidelines likely to be devised for ease of use and accuracy. I do think that some mechanisms to induce physicians to use rules and guidelines are needed, but this assumes that the guidelines are well done, easy to follow, and will change outcomes in some positive way. Physicians don't respond well to punishment, and carrots always work better than sticks. That's the thrust regarding the extensive “pay for performance” initiatives we see currently being trialed. Under this mechanism, for example, physicians would be paid for ordering fewer ankle x-rays, and there would be an incentive to use the Ottawa Ankle Rules. ACLS is, in my opinion, a totally different matter. Except for early defibrillation and perhaps bystander CPR, I know of no compelling data that show that following the ACLS guidelines will change outcomes for a condition that has as miserable a prognosis from the start as cardiac arrest. I think it is important to note that it is, in my view, totally inappropriate to require residency trained, board certified physicians to earn a card, as noted by Dr. Acosta. One of the initiatives in which I take personal pride was the successful effort to have the California Chapter of ACEP develop its “anti-merit badge” policy statement some 20 years ago. Although I was an ACLS-affiliate faculty in the Mesozoic era, I have not had an ACLS card for at least 20 years, and I have never had an ATLS, APLS, you-name-it card. It is an embarrassment that emergency physicians succumbed to earning these merit badges as is the whole concept that you needed to have a “valid” unexpired card or you could no longer perform. Total bull. That's not to say that it isn't a good idea to take these courses and stay up on the topics — this is a totally different matter. What I objected to was the fact that we had to take them and others often didn't, like the cardiologists. In the “old days,” they were generally clueless how to run a code and intubate patients, yet nobody had the nerve to say that cardiologists needed to be ACLS-certified to work in the CCU. We saw more arrests than anyone, and had more experience at it, and they were absolved and we weren't. I think Dr. Acosta and I are largely in agreement. And, to restate my core premise: Not one more dollar should be spent on developing guidelines (especially using my tax dollars) unless it is demonstrated that use of the guidelines substantially changes some important outcome in a positive way and there is some reasonable mechanism in place to actively promote adopting the guideline.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.020
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Meta-epidemiology (narrow), Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.658
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.020
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0300.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.460
GPT teacher head0.558
Teacher spread0.098 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it