Quote:
Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce
It's even tougher when the studies are bullshit. |
There's definitely a hierarchy of journals. Some (many) aren't worth reading and don't even show up on good database searches. You want peer-reviewed journals that have tough standards - The New England Journal of Medicine; Science; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - stuff like that.
Even then, I was taught both in my science degree and in my medical training to NOT read the discussion/conclusions until I'd studied the results for myself. Sometimes authors come to the wrong conclusion, or they miss something that's there in the data. It happens every so often. And you do need formal education in statistics and epidemiology to understand clinical and many other types of medical studies. I couldn't understand medical studies at a time when I could understand any scientific/lab bench paper. It's information - you need to know how the authors are treating the data: what's significant and what's not. And you need to understand study types and error and be able to see where a study is weak, maybe too weak in design to support any conclusion.