I know you can’t get published if you say something like “Our intervention is probably not useful and serves only as a cautionary tale for other wayward sailors”, but it still bothers me when you stretch the conclusions out by saying that an intervention that is probably not better than the control group “appears promising”.
This is a group that looked at the best way to improve parent education in pediatric asthma encounters in the Emergency Department. They compared a video-based education program to a written handout and found…it didn’t make much difference. They had two groups of parents, those with “low health literacy” and those with “adequate health literacy”. The low literacy group improved a ton regardless of which educational modality was used. The adequate literacy group barely budged with written and had a little bit more of bump with video – but the relative change in their level of literacy really wasn’t anything to write home about and they don’t try to offer an explanation for why intelligent people derive no benefit from written education.
But it doesn’t stop them from stating it “appears promising” – which, I suppose, means it’s probably better than not educating people at all, or potentially educating the illiterate.
“Parental Health Literacy and Asthma Education Delivery During a Visit to a Community-Based Pediatric Emergency Department.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21629152