The Dummies’ Guide to Reading Medical Evidence: Ten essential rules for evaluating health claims.

By Alan Cassels, CHA Director.

Medical advice can sound authoritative, scientific, and reassuring—and still be wrong. In this lively, practical course, writer and researcher Alan Cassels shows you how to look beyond the headlines, impressive statistics, and expert pronouncements to determine what medical evidence really tells us.

Drawing on examples related to statins, osteoporosis drugs, hormone replacement therapy, cancer screening, and more, Cassels explains ten essential rules for evaluating health claims. You’ll learn how to spot important missing or weak evidence and how to draw conclusions from how medicine benefits and harms are described. Matching your medical decisions to your own priorities is not about distrusting medicine; it’s about becoming a more confident, informed, and skeptical consumer of medical evidence.

Brief biography

Alan Cassels believes that humans need clean, clear health information as urgently as they need clean water. He has spent 32 years immersed in pharmaceutical policy research and healthcare journalism, mostly researching and writing about how prescription drugs are regulated, marketed, prescribed, and used. His books include Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning us All into Patients (co-written with Ray Moynihan), The ABCs of Disease Mongering: An Epidemic in 26 Letters, and Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease.

In his writings Cassels focuses on the needs of the end-user, ordinary people facing the sharp end of the medical industry’s marketing machine which is increasingly selling us tests, treatments and theories of disease that threaten to turn more and more of us into patients.

December 7 @ 5:30 – 7:30 pm PT / 6:30 – 8:30 pm MT / 8:30 – 10:30 pm ET

Cost: $40.
Discount: $30 (for members of CHA, CCCA, Canadians for Homeopathy and donors to VCC

Alternate Pay options: 

E-Transfer – email accounting@canadahealthalliance.org  to etransfer:
With the subject Line: ‘Medical Evidence Course’
Include your full name & email in the body of the email.

Cheque – payable to: Canada Health Alliance
Mail cheque to:  2440 East Rd, Denman Island, BC, V0R 1T0
With your full name, mailing address, course name ‘ Medical Evidence Course’ and email if you have one.

Note: If there is a cost to this event, paid CHA members are entitled to a discount. If you would like to get your membership discount, please login or click here.