Thursday, September 17, 2009

You Can Do This

For those of us who are not scientists, I recommend this referral from Bad Science to a helpful post by Dr. Alicia White on How to read articles about health and healthcare (PDF).

It's got good tips on evaluating the stories one reads, which tend to be full of exciting claims that grant license to drink beer until we're silly (I'm sticking to my theory that it's all about people wanting license for extremes of behavior).

It turns out that if you read carefully, the research usually does not support sweeping generalizations. (See how I nimbly avoided making a sweeping generalization about how research never supports such things? That's accuracy for you.)

But it's OK: I give you license to eat cake until you're silly. Go ahead! Have at it!

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