Petr Talantov

My name is Petr Talantov. I’m a writer, physician, teacher, entrepreneur, and public educator. I’m known in particular for the award-winning and best-selling book "0.05 Evidence-based medicine. From magic to the quest for immortality."

I teach a course on principles of evidence-based healthcare and some aspects of epidemiology to students enrolled in the Public Health Sciences Master's Program at ITMO University (St. Petersburg) and train family medicine residents in Almaty, Kazakhstan. I have extensive entrepreneurial and managerial experience, having established and managed an early successful e-commerce company, founded and led a non-profit foundation, and managed public awareness campaigns addressing the problem of the transparency of scientific data used to grant market authorisation to novel medicines.

I have been a member of the RAS Commission to Combat Pseudoscience since its inception. I write and deliver talks about all things related to evidence-based medicine and medical research.

My interests include meta-science, knowledge transfer, and evidence implementation. I’m interested in the ways knowledge is communicated and used in clinical decisions and policies. One specific area I’m focussing on is the well-known gap between EBM education and clinical practice.

I’m open to more opportunities to pursue my passion for teaching evidence-based health care. I teach undergraduate and postgraduate medical students both in academic and clinical settings (‘bedside teaching’) and do it differently from what has been traditionally done in the field. I don’t do journal clubs, and I don’t waste students’ time on rigorous risk of bias evaluation.

Instead, we learn how to do real-life EBM that accounts for the time constraints and patient load of real medical practice. We focus on sources of pre-appraised evidence and evidence summaries. In clinical settings, the teaching scenarios are based on real patients. I teach in English or Russian.

I do talks on evidence-based practice, misuse of science in healthcare, history, and the principles of medical research. Depending on the audience, they can be funny, entertaining, light, or mind-bending and challenging — I adapt them to those I speak to. I’ve given talks to groups of 20 to a thousand people at a time, from school kids to journalists and medical professionals.

Here is, for example, my way of talking about the applicability of nutritional research to real-life decisions to a non-professional audience.