So, so many questions!

 I first encountered science seriously as a health consumer advocate, a very long time ago. And I thought of medical and health research as a search for answers. Scientists were problem-solvers, using rigorous testing to sort out the wheat of reliable answers from the chaff of the false leads.But over time, as I watched the research pile up exponentially,...

Dec 2022

Some studies are MONSTERS!

 On the plus side, this jerk explains a lot about the data in a meta-analysis!This cartoon is a forest plot, a style of data visualization for meta-analysis results. Some people call them "blobbograms". Each of these horizontal lines with a square in the middle represents the results of a different study. The length of that horizontal line represents...

Nov 2022

Researching our way to better research?

 Here we see an expert in evidence synthesis meet a metascientist!Evidence synthesis is an umbrella term for the work of finding and making sense of a body of research – methods like systematic reviews and meta-analysis. And metascience is studying the methods of science itself. It includes studying the way science is published – see for example my...

Oct 2022

Trial participants and the luck of the draw

 The guy in this cartoon really drew a short straw: most clinical trial participants, at least, know they were in a study. On the other hand, he was lucky that he was getting to hear from the researchers about the study's results! That used to be quite unlikely.It might be getting better: a survey of trial authors from 2014-2015 found that half said...

Oct 2022

How are you?

 A simple question, theoretically, has a simple answer. That's not likely in a clinical trial, though. To measure in a way that can detect differences between groups, researchers often have to use methods that bear no relationship to how we think of a problem, or usually describe it.Pain is a classic example. We use a lot of vivid words to try to explain...

Oct 2022

How are you?

A simple question, theoretically, has a simple answer. That's not likely in a clinical trial, though. To measure in a way that can detect differences between groups, researchers often have to use methods that bear no relationship to how we think of a problem, or usually describe it.Pain is a classic example. We use a lot of vivid words to try to explain...

Oct 2022

In clinical trials, you can have it both ways

 "Were you in the vax group or the placebo?" It sounds like a simple question, that should have a simple answer, right? And usually it does. Unless it doesn’t. Welcome to the world of the cross-over trial!The garden variety randomized trial is a parallel or concurrent trial: people get randomized to one of 2 or more groups, and they continue on their...

Apr 2021

Clinical Trials - More Blinding, Less Worry!

She's right to be worried! There are so many possible cracks that bias can seep through, nudging clinical trial results off course. Some of the biggest come from people knowing which comparison group a participant will be, or has been, in. Allocation concealment and blinding are strategies to reduce this risk.Before we get to that, let's look at the...

Aug 2018

A Science Fortune Cookie

This fortune cookie could start a few scuffles. It's offering a cheerful scenario if you are looking for a benefit of a treatment, for example. But it sure would suck if you are measuring a harm! That's not what's contentious about it, though.It's the p values and their size that can get things very heated. The p value is the result you get from a standard...

Dec 2017

The Highs and Lows of the "Good Study"

Imagine if weather reports only gave the expected average temperature across a whole country. You wouldn't want to be counting on that information when you were packing for a trip to Alaska or Hawaii, would you?Yet that's what reports about the strength of scientific results typically do. They will give you some indication of how "good" the whole study...

Sep 2016