Why subscribe?
Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan have published widely in peer-reviewed journals as columnists in the Spectator and Spiked and regularly appear in the print and broadcast media.
We have a reputation for tackling controversial subjects and questioning the status quo, and we work with a broad group with skills in evidence-based medicine.
Consider subscribing to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update; consider a subscription allowing you to comment and pose topics that we may write on and discuss.
Soon we will start publishing chapters of a book on the problems with the registration and assessment of medical devices. This will be our first Substack book. You might need a tonic when you read it; some of the material comes with a health warning. It will be for paid subscribers.
Occasionally people republish our posts with an acknowledgement; if you’d like to do this, then first drop us a line so we can check it is OK, as not all of our posts are for syndication.
If you become a paid subscriber, you will help us continue our work and help us to steer policy towards evidence and not dogma.
How do we work?
We have lots of experience rooting out harms in healthcare and evaluating the regulatory evidence for drugs and devices.
We have several series, including the Transmission Riddle; Tales from the Front Line, and we’re about to add our latest book offering on Deadly Devices.
We often work with members of the public and organisations to assess harm. We have worked on several controversial areas: the damage caused by transvaginal mesh, oral hormone pregnancy tests and the risks of congenital malformations. We’ll be launching the Harms in Healthcare series later this year.
We work with a multidisciplinary team that has considerable expertise in sifting and summarising the evidence.
We base our work on the evidence; we integrate it with our clinical expertise and then write about it with societal values in mind.
Occasionally we publish guest posts on important topics relevant to healthcare.
What we’re working on
Tom is updating the review on Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses, and Carl is updating the Airborne transmission review.
We are using FOI requests to interpret hospital-acquired infections - see the requests in process on whatdotheyknow.
There are a number of reviews on cancer outcomes, care homes and mental health we’d like to update (see the CG reports).
We are working on the Stool with Three Legs with regard to the UK Covid response.
We’ve worked on Fraud and the loss of £37BILLION in Covid money from the public purse, and we’d like to further investigate the amount of waste.
All of this is resource-dependent, so if you want us to speed up, then please consider a gift or paid subscription.
Who runs Trust the Evidence?
Dr Tom Jefferson is a Senior Associate Tutor at the University of Oxford, a former researcher at the Nordic Cochrane Centre and a former scientific coordinator for the production of HTA reports on non-pharmaceuticals for Agenas, the Italian National Agency for Regional Healthcare.
Carl Heneghan is Professor of Evidence-based Medicine at the University of Oxford. He is a clinical epidemiologist with expertise in evidence-based medicine, research methods, and evidence synthesis, and works as an NHS urgent care GP. He has over 400 peer-reviewed publications (H index 83 as of Jan 2023); published over 100. He is a Contact Editor in the Cochrane Acute Respiratory Infection Group and Editor of the Catalogue of Bias. His work includes investigating drugs and devices, advising governments on regulatory evidence, and working with the media to assess health claims and research common conditions in primary care.
See some of our previous work as authors of the Tamiflu reviews.
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