Table 1. List of key concepts from the Informed Health Choices project ¹¹.

1. Beware of treatment claims like these: We hear claims about the effects of treatments all the time. Many of these are not trustworthy. When you hear someone use one of these reasons to support a claim about the effects of a treatment, you should beware and ask where the evidence is.
1.1. Beware of claims that are too good to be true	1.    “100% safe!” *
	2.    “100% effective!”
	3.    “100% certain!”
1.2. Beware of claims based on faulty logic	4.    “Treatment needed!”
	5.    “It works like this!”
	6.    “Associated with!”
	7.    “Real world data!”
	8.    “No comparison needed!” *
	9.    “A study shows!” *
	10.    “Old is better!” *
	11.    “New is better!” *
	12.    “More is better!”
	13.    “Early is better!”
	14.    “Personalised medicine!”
1.3. Beware of claims based on trust alone	15.    “As advertised!” *
	16.    “It worked for me!” *
	17.    “Recommended by experts!” *
	18.    “Peer reviewed!”
2. Check the evidence from treatment comparisons A treatment has to be compared to something else to know what would happen without the treatment. For treatment comparisons to be FAIR, the only important difference between comparison groups should be the treatments they receive. Unfair treatment comparisons and unsystematic summaries of treatment comparisons can be misleading. The way that treatment effects are described can also be misleading.
2.1. Don’t be misled by unfair comparisons!	19.    Dissimilar comparison groups *
	20.    Indirect comparisons
	21.    Dissimilar attention and care
	22.    Dissimilar expectations or behaviours *
	23.    Dissimilar assessment of outcomes
	24.    Unreliable assessment of outcomes
	25.    Lots of people not followed-up
	26.    Outcomes counted in the wrong group
2.2. Don’t be misled by unreliable summaries of treatment comparisons!	27.    Unsystematic summaries
	28.    Selective reporting
	29.    Unfounded assumptions
2.3. Don’t be misled by how treatment effects are described!	30.    Just words
	31.    Relative effects
	32.    Average effects
	33.    Few people or events *
	34.    Subgroup analyses
	35.    Statistically significant
	36.    No confidence interval
	37.    No evidence
3. Make well-informed treatment choices Deciding what to do requires judgements about the relevance of the evidence, how important the good and bad outcomes are to you, and how sure you can be about the treatment effects.
3.1. What is the problem and what are the options?	38.    What is your health problem and what are your options?
3.2. Is the evidence relevant?	39.    What outcomes matter to you?
	40.    Are the people (or animals) very different from you?
	41.    Are the treatments different from those available to you?
	42.    Are the circumstances different from yours?
3.3. Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages?	43.    Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages for you? *
	44.    How sure are you about the treatment effects?

^*The 12 concepts included in the learning resources of the IHC project for primary school children. The IHC Key Concepts' explanations are available from the “That’s a Claim” website. This table has been reproduced with permission from Oxman et al. (Box 3) ¹¹.