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Medical students are using popular research tool to pump out misleading studies

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Re: Medical students are using popular research tool to pump out misleading studies

#51

Post by alcasa »

eunos wrote: post #50

That aside I am a bit perplexed that almost absolute insistence of medical students to become researchers as well, it seems just become a pure practitioner is not a feasible option. To make it worse it looks more acceptable that a doctor really provide bad service or lacking communication and empathy to patients than not being a researcher.

Clinical research is in a weird spot, where you need both clinical experience and research experience. Getting the former already requires long hours and you are swamped with work. The latter is highly age gated and if you want to pursue research you often need to achieve specific milestones before a certain age, e.g. to be considered for tenure etc.

Re: Medical students are using popular research tool to pump out misleading studies

#52

Post by redsocksfan45 »

humanfromearth9 wrote: post #31
whizzter wrote: post #25

Researcher/academics pay/promotoins should be contingent on reviewing,challenging and reproducing papers rather than publishing quantity, because publishing cartels and AI has already degraded most research fields.

No. You can't spend all your money on rehashing past results. Some, OK, all, not. In many fields, the money is needed for discovery.

[dead]

Re: Medical students are using popular research tool to pump out misleading studies

#53

Post by redsocksfan45 »

eunos wrote: post #50

That aside I am a bit perplexed that almost absolute insistence of medical students to become researchers as well, it seems just become a pure practitioner is not a feasible option. To make it worse it looks more acceptable that a doctor really provide bad service or lacking communication and empathy to patients than not being a researcher.

[dead]

Re: Medical students are using popular research tool to pump out misleading studies

#54

Post by pjc50 »

whizzter wrote: post #46
pjc50 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should be, but you've got to tell the funders that.

I think I was more referring to academia than commercial research even if there is a large intersection.

Academia is almost entirely steered by government policy, at least in the Anglosphere. There is a bureaucratic not-very-scientific evaluation process for research proposals. And things like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Excellence_Framework , which has been criticized for practically requiring people to game the "impact" metric in order to keep their jobs.

Re: Medical students are using popular research tool to pump out misleading studies

#55

Post by spchampion2 »

My potentially unpopular opinion: Congress should ban residency programs from using Medicare training dollars to pay for research. They should do this with the goal of speeding up the training pipeline for actual practitioners, many of whom are now required to spend a year of their residency doing research of some kind.

If medical residents, or teaching hospitals, want people to do research, they should go get funding from established research funding sources that have standards and practices for funding and monitoring research.

Re: Medical students are using popular research tool to pump out misleading studies

#56

Post by jansport123 »

jmyeet wrote: post #43

I can explain what's going on here. For context, you need to know how somebody becomes a doctor in the US. 1. You get a 4 year degree in college. You hopefully get a very good GPA. You need to do so-called pre-med classes that really don't have much to do with medical education but are known as "weed out" classes, particularly Organic Chemistry. If you don't do these in your 4 year degree, you can do a program afterw…

don't existing doctors aim to keep supply short? Seems like it's like the homeowner problem (existing homeowners always want their house prices to go up)

Re: Medical students are using popular research tool to pump out misleading studies

#57

Post by jjulius »

zemvpferreira wrote: post #42

As a former scientist it's embarrassing how easily the dismal state of science today could have been predicted decades before by applying Goodhart's Law, or any simple train of thought on incentives and moral hazard. Instead we chose to assume scientists collectively behave on a higher plane. No wonder the general public distrusts "the intelectual elite", we deserved it.

>Instead we chose to assume scientists collectively behave on a higher plane.

People are people.

Re: Medical students are using popular research tool to pump out misleading studies

#58

Post by 11101010010001 »

niekmaas wrote: post #11
fn-mote wrote: post #3

My assumption is the credibility of a non-PhD-holding medical student’s research is 0, just like (almost) any other inexperienced researcher.

Well, that is a statement..! As an MD PhD with over 60 (co-)publications including multiple in top 1% journals I can say for sure that this is untrue. Of course this may be different per topic and country, but there is perfect research being published by non-PhD scientists. In fact, the PI from a top-tier US university I collaborate with for over 10 years doesn't even have a PhD.

Both your statement and the OPs are an appeal to expertise which is not a substitute for the scientific method.

Re: Medical students are using popular research tool to pump out misleading studies

#59

Post by tstactplsignore »

zemvpferreira wrote: post #42

As a former scientist it's embarrassing how easily the dismal state of science today could have been predicted decades before by applying Goodhart's Law, or any simple train of thought on incentives and moral hazard. Instead we chose to assume scientists collectively behave on a higher plane. No wonder the general public distrusts "the intelectual elite", we deserved it.

This article is about MD doctors, not scientists (although there may be some MD-PhDs in it, and yes MDs can get research positions).

MD doctors poll at extraordinarily high levels of trust, over almost any other professional group in the United States. So it really isn't correct to directly link this article's topic to "distrust". The effect you're talking about may exist in science, but this article is essentially a counter example to the effect you propose: clinicians publishing bullshit, but retain a high level of public trust.

Especially because the article is basically entirely quoting practicing scientists who identified this problem in the first place! More real scientific training or collaborating for clinicians who want to (or have to) do research could potentially improve the situation.

Re: Medical students are using popular research tool to pump out misleading studies

#60

Post by nickgros »

eunos wrote: post #50

That aside I am a bit perplexed that almost absolute insistence of medical students to become researchers as well, it seems just become a pure practitioner is not a feasible option. To make it worse it looks more acceptable that a doctor really provide bad service or lacking communication and empathy to patients than not being a researcher.

Guidelines and standards can change quickly. It's important for clinicians to have a foundational understanding of statistical methods and to be able to critique studies.

For certain specialties, the number of residency positions is so limited that medical students have to publish research to be competitive, even if they have no interest in doing so later in their career.

But altogether I sort of agree, the incentives are pretty maligned such that for many it's just easier to become a bad scientist with more publications than a good one with fewer.

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