How to do a better job of researching medical and health articles

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you are searching for a speech topic, then you might decide look at a current medical or health article. At the McGill Office for Science and Society on April 14, 2022 there is an excellent article by Jonathan Jarry titled Doing Your Own Research a Little Bit Better. It discusses how to look closely at a magazine article and decide how much of it makes sense. His three-take home messages are:

 

1] Figuring out the trustworthiness and relevance of a scientific paper first requires identifying what kind of study it is (if it even is a study), which helps us know if the evidence is likely to be strong or weak.

  

2] There are red flags that should reduce our trust in the evidence presented in a paper, such as the absence of a control group, a very small number of participants, and spotlighting of a positive secondary result when the main outcome the study was designed to look at was negative.

 

3] Evaluating the worth of a paper can be helped by having many scientists look at it, which is why data detectives who spend their spare time denouncing bad papers and websites like PubPeer and Retraction Watch are helpful.

 

On January 13, 2020 I blogged about a study where the main outcome was negative in a post titled Did a clinical trial show the dietary supplement pill Prevagen improves memory? Only when you forget about more than half of their data.

 

You might look for articles at PubMed Central and abstracts at PubMed. On June 29, 2021 I blogged about how Finding a magazine article at PubMed does not mean that the article is any good.

 

You also can look up the lead author (and other authors) at sites like Wikipedia, the Rational Wiki, Quackwatch, and even the Encyclopedia of American Loons to see what red flags their reputations raise. For example, Joseph Mercola shows up in specific pages at Rational Wiki, Quackwatch, and the Encyclopedia of American Loons. There also is a long article by David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine on July 25, 2021 titled Joe Mercola: An antivaccine quack tycoon pivots effortlessly to profit from spreading COVID-19 misinformation.

 

The magnifying glass was adapted from this image by Niabot at Wikimedia Commons. 

 

UPDATE

On April 25, 2022 David Gorski has an article at Science-Based Medicine titled Scientific review articles as antivaccine disinformation. There he discusses another article titled Innate immune suppression by SARS-Cov-2 mRNA vaccinations: The role of G-quadruplexes, exosomes, and MicroRNAs. The lead author of that article, Stephanie Seneff, has the dubious honor of a web page about her at the Encyclopedia of American Loons.