"Sutton's Law in Surgery: 'That's Where the Money is'".

Many students, residents, and learners have heard of the infamous bank robber, who when arrested was asked "Why do you rob banks?" He supposedly replied "Because that's where the money is." Except it did not happen that way. He did rob close to a hundred banks and jewelry stores and stole an estimated $2,000,000.

Creating historical controls using data from a previous line of treatment - Two non-standard approaches.

Where medical interventions are licensed based on only uncontrolled study data (for example a single-arm trial), a common approach for estimating the incremental benefit is to compare the treatment to a 'historical control'; data collected from patients who did not receive the intervention. We illustrate with motivating examples two methods for the creation of historical controls where disease progression and overall survival are typically the key clinically meaningful endpoints. The first method utilises information routinely collected in a clinical trial programme: patients' time to disease progression on their previous line of treatment against which outcomes can be compared.

Contemporary experience with cholecystectomy: establishing 'benchmarks' two decades after the introduction of laparoscopic cholecystectomy.

With quality and public reporting of increasing importance, benchmarks are anticipated to grow in relevance. We studied cholecystectomy in a practice in an urban tertiary care hospital. A total of 1083 cholecystectomies were performed in 2008 and 2009.