Buy “A Clinical’s Guide to Statistics in Mental Health” book and receive a 10% discount on this course, equivalent to getting the book for free for the CME course or at half price or greater discount for non-CME courses.
Simply email the receipt from your book purchase to info@psychiatryletter.com to receive the discount.
Register now for an all-new course: “From Research to Practice,” which began in May 2023. The course consists of 8 lectures on understanding and analyzing psychiatric research studies with explanations of basic statistical concepts. It is based on the new release of the second edition of “A Clinician’s Guide to Statistics in Mental Health” by Nassir Ghaemi MD MPH.
All recordings will remain available to you for up to 3 years. The fee is for the entire course, and you will receive an email in response with the course link within 5 business days of booking. All recordings will be made available upon booking for a total of 8 sessions.
This course will not provide CME credit and is appropriate for international attendees or others who do not need or want CME or CEU credits. Reduced rate provided.
$299.00
Listen to Dr. Nassir Ghaemi present 8 recorded classes in 1 hour blocs. Watch at your own convenience.
Recorded sessions include:
Video 1 - Why your clinical experience can be wrong: Confounding bias
There’s an old saying in medicine: Half of what I’ll teach you is right, and half is wrong; I just don’t know which half. Confounding bias is real-world life. You see something happen, and you think it was caused by something else. You might be right, you might be wrong. One thing is certain: you aren’t always right. In fact, you aren’t usually right. That’s confounding bias. You can’t believe your eyes in your clinical experience because other things often are happening that you don’t know about. Those are confounding factors.
Video 2 - Basic concepts of evidence-based medicine: observational studies
Real-world experience can be gathered and analyzed in studies that are call “observational”. The can be chart review or large epidemiological studies. They can involve ten patients or the entire population of Sweden. And they can be terribly wrong, because of confounding bias. This doesn’t mean such studies are useless, and correctly analyzed, they can be meaningful. We’ll explore how to analyze such studies so that participants can know when they’re right and when they’re wrong.
Video 3 - Basic concepts of evidence-based medicine: Randomized trials
The greatest revolution in medicine was not discovering a certain drug or treatment. It was the discovery and implementation recently in human history, in the 1950s, of randomization and the creation of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) as the test of medical treatments. Randomization is the solution to confounding bias. Other factors are removed as possible influences when two groups are randomly assigned to a treatment. In a RCT, assuming its large enough and well conducted, you can finally believe your eyes.
Video 4 - The p-value explained and other topics
Most people think statistics is about equations and if they’ve heard of anything, they’ve heard of the “p-value,” which is supposed to indicate whether a finding is “real” or not. That’s not true. The p-value, correctly used, reflects the likelihood that a finding happened by chance to a high degree (95%) or not; but that finding could still be false. The p-value was invented to analyze RCTs, but it is misused constantly for other purposes for which it wasn’t created. We’ll review those common mistakes, and teach participants when and why they should ignore p-values, and how to use better alternatives, like effect sizes.
Video 5 - Alchemy in modern science: Meta-analysis
Combining the results of different studies can help understand a field; meta-analysis is one way to conduct such a review. Like all statistics, conducted correctly, it is helpful, and conducted wrongly, it is misleading and false. Again, participants will find out how to tell the difference.
Video 6 - Applications: The canon of psychiatry - CATIE, STARD, STEPBD
In the late 1990s, the NIMH funded three large academic psychopharmacology treatment trials in the main psychiatric illnesses of schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar illness. The principles in prior lectures will be applied to the results of these studies and their findings will be applied to clinical practice. Frequently, participants will find that the authors of those studies misinterpreted their results, and have misled clinicians in practice.
Video 7 - Applications: Misleading meta-analyses - The serotonin hypothesis of depression; Antidepressant efficacy
The lecture on meta-analysis will be applied to recent commonly discussed reviews of the serotonin hypothesis in depression, of antidepressant efficacy, and of lithium’s utility for suicide prevention. In all cases, the incorrect use of meta-analysis will be identified and mistaken clinical conclusions will be analyzed.
Video 8 - Applications: Observational studies and randomized clinical trials
The lecture on observational studies will be used to analyze common and oft-cited observational studies regarding treatment of psychiatric conditions, especially large epidemiological reports from Scandinavia or other sources, and the correctness or falsehood of some aspects of the interpretations of those studies will be analyzed. Misinterpretations of randomized clinical trials also will be examined, including a recent study on lithium efficacy for suicidality.
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