Early Life
Born and educated in his native Colombia, he obtained his medical degree in 1986 from Javeriana University. While still a teenaged medical student, he collected the largest data set on jargon, chemical composition and clinical implications of cocaine base (crack) abuse in Colombia, becoming an internationally sought after speaker. Before completing his residence in anesthesiology at Javeriana University, he co-authored his first book, Neuroanesthesia and Neurosurgical Critical Care with Dr. Mario Ruiz, a leading Colombian anesthesiologist affiliated with Santa Fe de Bogota Foundation. This was the first textbook in this area ever published in Spanish.
In 1988, he married Martha Lucia Garcia, a biochemist from Javeriana University, with whom he had two daughters, Alia and Tamen. In 1989, he received a British Council Scholarship that enabled him to become a Research Fellow at the Oxford Pain Relief Unit, Nuffield Department of Anaesthetics, University of Oxford. In 1992, he received an Overseas Research Student Award from the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom for work on the opioid responsiveness of neuropathic pain, and became a doctoral student at Balliol College, University of Oxford. In 1994, he received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Clinical Medicine after completing a thesis entitled Meta-analysis of randomised clinical trials in pain relief, becoming one of the first physicians in the world with a doctorate on knowledge synthesis, under the supervision of Henry J. McQuay, Professor in Pain Relief, University of Oxford, and the co-supervision of Iain Chalmers, then Director of the UK Cochrane Centre, Oxford. His examiners were Drs. David Sackett, then Oxford Professor of Evidence-based Medicine and Adrian Grant, Director of the Health Services Research Unit at the University of Aberdeen. His thesis involved the development of new tools to distill high-quality health-related information, new methods to build specialized bibliographic databases to support health-related decisions, and the validation of the most widely used tool to assess the quality of clinical trials in the world: the Jadad scale.
Read more about this topic: Alejandro R. Jadad Bechara
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