Interview with Professor Gordon Guyatt on Critical Thinking and Medical Advice
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Science (Medium)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/02/01
Professor Gordon Guyatt, MD, MSc, FRCP, OC is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact and Medicine at McMaster University. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.
The British Medical Journal or BMJ had a list of 117 nominees in 2010 for the Lifetime Achievement Award. Guyatt was short-listed and came in second-place in the end. He earned the title of an Officer of the Order of Canada based on contributions from evidence-based medicine and its teaching.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2012 and a Member of the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame in 2015. He lectured on public vs. private healthcare funding in March of 2017, which seemed like a valuable conversation to publish in order to have this in the internet’s digital repository with one of Canada’s foremost academics.
For those with an interest in standardized metrics or academic rankings, he is the14th most cited academic in the world in terms of H-Index at 222 and has a total citation count of more than 200,000. That is, he has among the highest H-Indexes, likely, of any Canadian academic living or dead.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What should the public keep in mind about critical thinking with regards to some health recommendations, those that can come their way. It can come from reliable sources including experts in the country, from non-governmental sources, and others of similar weight. That’s one class of information resources.
But then there’s another set of them. They can include, for instance, pop up ads on Facebook or questionable publications giving medical advice. What are some tips you might have in mind for some the general public?
Distinguished Professor Gordon Guyatt: If I were getting one thing, or even anything, if it comes off the internet, it is safest not to believe it. That would be the first thing. They should critically evaluate interventions. It is not easy. It’s not an easy thing and what is an easy thing is to present a much rosier picture of an intervention than the truth.
You have these real catastrophes like multiple sclerosis, the vein hypothesis about vein obstruction causing multiple sclerosis, and so on; people got terribly excited about this and went off to various places in the world.
And it turns out to be completely bogus. So, you have big disasters, and you have smaller disasters. And the thing is the bottom line, there are reliable sources for patients, so that many major organizations and reliable textbooks up to date have sections for patients and those would be the sort of source that would be reliable.
But ultimately, it may look good in general, but things are always specific to individual patients and wherever else you get your information talk about it with your doctor.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Professor Guyatt.
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