Testing Treatments was written to address a fundamental healthcare question: ‘How do we ensure that research into medical treatments best meets the needs of patients?’ Because research often fails to answer this question, and because many treatments are not based on sound evidence, the authors set out to promote better and more critical public evaluation of the effects of medical treatments.
One reviewer of Testing Treatments rated this little book as “important, scary and encouraging”. It’s important because people need to know why treatments must be tested carefully. It’s scary, because the book provides plenty of examples of how people have suffered and sometimes died because treatments have not been tested rigorously. And the book is encouraging because it shows how everyone can play a part in promoting better research for better health care.
In his Foreword to the book, Ben Goldacre concludes that the tricks of the medical research trade are better explained in Testing Treatments than anywhere else he has encountered. The original English text has been translated into many other languages; and new translations continue to appear, emphasizing the enduring relevance of a text first published in 2011. The texts of the English original and of all the translations are now available to download for free from language-specific websites accessible through www.testingtreatments.org, and from Cochrane.org through http://training.cochrane.org/search/site/testing-treatments.
In this special session, those responsible for some of the translations will explain why they decided that the book was worth translating, and what was involved in preparing the translations and in establishing Testing Treatments interactive (TTi) language-specific websites. Considerable scope exists for further translations: for example, the book has not yet been translated into any South Asian languages. The panel of presenters will answer questions about the practicalities of preparing further translations and establishing TTi sibling websites.
