Diverse perspectives on science and medicine
It started in June, with cardiovascular disease. Then August ended with another bout, but in cancer. It’s been a rough few months for non-inferiority clinical trials! We’ve known for as long as there
This, in 2008: Women make up an ever-increasing fraction of the students who train to become biomedical scientists, but their career attrition is disproportionate to that of men. If these trends continue, this
I concede that there is a strong argument against developing an evidence base on vacations. What difference would it make? Wringing out productivity increases can grievously outweigh concern for worker welfare. Shockingly high
With each set of hands study results pass through, there is a chance for another layer of spin to be added or chipped away. Adding is awfully common, though. By the time it
Just how reliable are our memories of what we ate? How about what we will admit to having eaten? Questions like these have caused fierce public debate in the last few years. The
A couple of years ago, psychologist Susan Fiske launched a broadside against science bloggers – since taken offline – packed with name-calling. That launched a spate of blogging, musing on what it meant
When engineer and political economist William Playfair started designing graphical representations of data in the 18th century, he was trying, he said, “to clear up my own ideas on the subject”. Many of us
A long time ago, I first encountered science seriously as a health consumer advocate. And I thought of medical and health research as a search for answers. Scientists were Popper’s problem-solvers, using rigorous testing
The scientific community invests a huge amount of time into peer review at journals, and it’s critical to what we end up reading, and to scientists’ careers. Yet, as we saw
You would think that something as critical to science as peer review in journals would itself have a strong grounding in science, wouldn’t you? But it doesn’t. The quantity of research is meagre,