Here are five manuscript transgressions that make me hit "Reject" faster that you can blink. The first four in particular do not instill confidence in what you actually did in the study.1. Matched cohort masquerading as a case-controlThis happens quite a bit with papers submitted to third and fourth tier journals, but watch out for it anywhere. The authors claim to have done a matched case-control study, where there is indeed matching. However, the...
Wednesday, 31 August 2011
Friday, 26 August 2011
Botox and empathy: Less is more
I am kind of stuck on this whole Botox-empathy thing. A recent study from researchers at Duke and UCLA implied that people who get Botox to attenuate their wrinkles also seem to attenuate their empathic ability. Somehow their inability to mimic others' facial expressions impairs the firing of their mirror neurons and they top feeling empathy. Wow!But think of it -- Botulinum toxin, arguably one of the most potent poisons known to humans, is being...
Thursday, 25 August 2011
Side effects: The subject must become the scientist
A few weeks ago someone I know, a normally robust and energetic woman, began to feel fatigued and listless, and had some strange sensations in her chest. She presented to her primary care MD, who obtained an EKG and a full panel of blood tests. The former showed some non-specific changes, while the latter was entirely normal. Although reassured, she continued to experience malaise. When she fetched her EKG, she received a copy with the computer interpretation...
Wednesday, 17 August 2011
Counterfactuals: I know you are, but what am I?
It occurs to me that as we talk more and more about personalized medicine, the tension between the need for individual vs. group data is likely to intensify. And with it, it is important to have the vocabulary to articulate the role for each.Scientific method, in order to disprove the null hypothesis, demands highly controlled experimental conditions, where only a single exposure is altered. While this is feasible when dealing with chemical reactions...
Tuesday, 16 August 2011
Medicine and the internet: Harnessing the yottabytes
What if medicine in the US is just like the internet? What if it is just as difficult to separate the chaff from the wheat in medicine as it is on the web?Both the curse and the blessing of the web is its accessibility. This means that anyone's voice can be heard. And it also means that anyone's voice can be heard. So, we are just as likely to stumble upon drivel as we are on information gold. And what takes time and skill is separating the two into...
