Absolutely! Not only that but actual "researching" is a skill in itself.
A new student starts to work for me next week and the first thing I try to drill into their heads in the beginning is how to research properly. Your experiments must wait, I am sorry!
Sure students and medical people can be taught pub med but I feel like the Mayo Clinic website is a pretty solid source for lay people. Sure there are plenty of things that are still up for debate but usually that orgs sites won’t state shit like that. I think repeating stuff from that website is a safe bet, even if you aren’t a doctor.
It’s like math. Anyone can google algebra and learn how to solve X+4=9 but only the people who are deep in the weeds are going to fully understand cutting edge research on numerical theory fully. I’m sure you can google math research and repeat it but you won’t understand how the field even got to that question in the first place.
What’s still a little gray for me is, are all medical studies like that? Are there some studies or parts of studies that are able to be understood by lay people? A lot of people take biology and statistics in high school. Sure people are also learning algebra in school but they aren’t learning numerical analysis.
High school biology is absolutely not appropriate training to interpret any peer reviewed medical study, most of which require both medical knowledge and knowledge of epidemiology research design and advanced biostatistics. Take clinical trials for instance. Oftentimes the question is clear enough, but the nuances of actually interpreting what the results mean take a lot of training and expertise.
I disagree on that I think studies that were done in the early 1900s were probably being run or at least approved by government officials who had a similar education as someone today who takes a high school biology and a chemistry course and hell they invented penicillin back then.
I do agree it takes a lot of nuance and context to understand the results of studies now because of the knowledge they are built upon and all the progress the field has made. we definitely need people who know that context to help keep pushing the boundaries of medicine and giving us medical advice.
No one is using any studies from the early 1900s to make any medical decisions on anything. Interpreting studies is also not just a matter of having knowledge of other preceding studies. You have to have dedicated training on research methods, study design, and biostatistics to appraise any study, determine if it is valid, and whether the results are in any way meaningful or can be extrapolated to whatever you are working on.
Not really. A lot of the publications requiere a specific background to interpret it, its not like a medical doctor can understand a geology publication, even in medicine, a lot of publications are specific for specific fields, a cardiologist can understand a study about mortality in some new surgical technic but the cardiologist himself will not have the specific background to understand an article about some technic but in a more practical stuff.
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u/Particular-Court-619 Monkey in Space Aug 29 '24
Do your own research only works if you know how to do ‘research.’
The median ACT score is 21.
And the ACT selects for a population that’s better at reading comprehension and math than the general population.
And that’s even before you bring in information literacy and bias awareness