Category Archives: Science

QUESTIONING ALL NUTRIENT STUDIES.

Posted on August 6, 2015 by Philip

QUESTIONING ALL NUTRIENT STUDIES. I see that I have posted ten times previously about John Ioannidis, now a professor of medicine and statistics at Stanford. Professor Ioannidis heads a new institute for research on how research is done. I posted … Continue reading →

Posted in Journalism, Science | Leave a comment

IT’S GOING TO BE OFFICIALLY OK TO EAT EGGS—AFTER OVER 30 YEARS.

Posted on August 5, 2015 by Philip

IT’S GOING TO BE OFFICIALLY OK TO EAT EGGS—AFTER OVER 30 YEARS. Because of warnings that eating eggs could raise my cholesterol, I ate only a few eggs a year for many years. Then a doctor told me in 1982 … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics, Science | Leave a comment

BIG DATA AND MEDICINES.

Posted on July 30, 2015 by Philip

BIG DATA AND MEDICINES. The Economist article seems to assume that the only interesting source of information about the effectiveness of drugs is a clinical trial. I will take Tamiflu as a hypothetical. The article points out that the British … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Science | Leave a comment

PUBLISHING THE RESULTS OF ALL CLINICAL TRIALS.

Posted on July 29, 2015 by Philip

PUBLISHING THE RESULTS OF ALL CLINICAL TRIALS. I have posted a number of times about the need for publishing replications studies and negative results. For example, I said here: “If more papers are published, more dull but important negative results … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Science | Leave a comment

YELLOW-CROWNED NIGHT HERONS.

Posted on July 2, 2015 by Philip

YELLOW-CROWNED NIGHT HERONS. On our walks, we are again encountering night heron nests on Bell Island. I posted on them here. We spoke with a man who has a nest in a tree right above his mailbox. He seemed on … Continue reading →

Posted in Science | 2 Comments

AN ARGUMENT FOR ALIEN PLANTS.

Posted on June 30, 2015 by Philip

AN ARGUMENT FOR ALIEN PLANTS. We have been walking to Long Island Sound again. I have posted, for example here, about the pleasure we take on our walks from phragmites—tall reeds, faded to brown with feathery brown tops. I acknowledged … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Science | Leave a comment

FORMULA 1 AND TREATING HEART ATTACKS.

Posted on June 26, 2015 by Philip

FORMULA 1 AND TREATING HEART ATTACKS. I posted here six years ago about how doctors at a British hospital had studied and consulted with a Formula 1 pit crew to improve their handoffs from the cardiac care unit to the … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Science, Sports | 3 Comments

REDUCING DEATHS FROM HEART ATTACKS WITHOUT A SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGH.

Posted on June 25, 2015 by Philip

REDUCING DEATHS FROM HEART ATTACKS WITHOUT A SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGH. Instapundit linked to this article by Gina Kolata in the New York Times (June 21) which reports on the reduction of about 38% from 2003 to 2013 in the death rate … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Science | 1 Comment

BREAST SELF EXAMINATION AND RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED EXPERIMENTS.

Posted on June 1, 2015 by Philip

BREAST SELF EXAMINATION AND RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED EXPERIMENTS. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (“USPSTF”) represents an official view that medical treatment should be “evidence-based medicine”. That is there should be no treatment unless it has passed muster in a randomized … Continue reading →

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SCIENCE VERSUS THE HEALTH OF PATIENTS.

Posted on May 31, 2015 by Philip

SCIENCE VERSUS THE HEALTH OF PATIENTS. The argument for requiring randomized clinical trials is that this is the “gold standard” for science. (I note that there are those, such as Ziliak and Teather Posadas, who do not agree with that … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Science | Leave a comment