How Many Contemporary Medical Practices Are Worse Than Doing Nothing or Doing Less?

Improving patient safety by doing less rather than more: many peripheral intravenous catheters are unnecessary

We would like to congratulate Kampf and colleagues on their study, which demonstrates the effectiveness of a multimodal intervention to improve safety for the insertion of peripheral intravenous catheters (PIVC) [1]. The issue of nosocomial infection is a small but real risk associated with the insertion of PIVC [2]. While we support and agree with the approach of the authors, we feel they may ...

How are we doing?

Measuring the performance of community safety partnerships 'Safe and sound', published in May 2000, reported the findings of an Accounts Commission study of community safety partnerships. s The report identified the progress made to date, highlighted good practice and made a number of recommendations. The report found that across Scotland, community safety strategies are generally at an early s...

Doing Much About Nothing

One of the interesting problems concerning experimental results is what happens when an experiment gives a null result, when the phenomenon expected is not observed. Is it because the experimental apparatus and the associated analysis procedures cannot detect or measure the phenomenon in question or is it because the phenomenon is not present? This is a real problem in the practice of physics. ...

Doing fatherhood, doing family: contemporary paternal perspectives

Tainted altruism: when doing some good is evaluated as worse than doing no good at all.

In four experiments, we found that the presence of self-interest in the charitable domain was seen as tainting: People evaluated efforts that realized both charitable and personal benefits as worse than analogous behaviors that produced no charitable benefit. This tainted-altruism effect was observed in a variety of contexts and extended to both moral evaluations of other agents and participant...