PICO

Every once in a while, a man discovers that he has happened upon a question that no one has asked.

The opportunity it presents? The answer, to a question, no one asked.

PICO questions in paediatrics are like that. Patient, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome. Is there an association between febrile convulsions and later development of dyslexia? Fuck knows.

There were no papers on both topics on Medline, at least. This makes for a fertile research opportunity, and perhaps the possibility of shaking things up in the medical world. Maybe febrile convulsions are not so benign after all? After all, a febrile convulsion could well be a sign of something sinister; who knows what happens to the long-term synaptic developmental patterns of a child subject to a fit?

Just because conventional Medicine says that febrile convulsions in themselves are well, benign, in the short term at least, does not mean that we should ignore possible long-term subtle damage.