News from The Cochrane Collaboration
by Simon French BAppSc(Chiro), MPH.

Cochrane Library
Have you visited The Cochrane Library lately? The Cochrane Library is released four times per year. All Australians have open access to the full text of all Cochrane Reviews thanks to a National licence from the Commonwealth Government. Just put the following address in your internet browser and click away: www.thecochranelibrary.org.

Each issue is packed with articles of interest to chiropractors and osteopaths. Here are just a few new or updated Cochrane systematic reviews from the latest issue (Issue #3, 2005):

• Exercises for mechanical neck disorders
• Exercise therapy for treatment of non-specific low back pain
• Hip protectors for preventing hip fractures in older people
• Interventions for preventing obesity in children
• Self-help interventions for smoking cessation
• St John’s Wort for depression
• Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) for chronic low-back pain
• Vitamin A for treating measles in children

As well as a database of Cochrane systematic reviews, The Cochrane Library also contains a database called “Central”. This is a collection of every known controlled clinical trial. The Collaboration trawls other databases and hand searches journals to locate every controlled trial ever published, and even some that have not been published. This is a great resource for chiropractors and osteopaths and should be used before any other database when you are looking for high quality evidence about a treatment.

Cochrane Colloquium
A reminder that the Cochrane Colloquium, the annual scientific and business meeting of the Cochrane Collaboration, will be held in Melbourne from 22 to 26 October.

The theme of the Colloquium is ‘corroboree’ and the scientific program will appeal to all those involved in generating and using evidence to inform decision-making, whether as clinicians, policy-makers, researchers or consumers.

The plenary sessions have now been finalised and the topics are:

• Developing a valid product people want: how do we improve the format and content of reviews?
• Doing the right reviews: how do we ensure our reviews bring about answers to important questions?
• Growing partnerships: how do we enable wide participation and access?

Full details are available on the website: www.colloquium.info

So broaden your knowledge of the healthcare and research community at large and I’ll see you at the Colloquium in Melbourne.