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

science.org

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

#81

Post by mistrial9 »

georgeburdell wrote: post #76
fluidcruft wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MD doctors (and even to a large extent DO doctors nowadays) are philosophically grounded on science. An MD fundamentally practices science. That used to be one of the key differences between MD and DO physicians, but science has been so successful at advancing the standard of care that DOs cannot ignore it anymore. That's just to say that MDs are expected to be fluent in science and it's not some arbitrary expectatio…

Due to the high trust they get from the public, I have run into many MDs who are used to making unfounded assertions with little pushback.

"fasting is a disaster for the body" says radio MD with complete confidence.. one of my personal favorites

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

#82

Post by currymj »

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…

do you know why residencies value the number of research items? Why would having a large number of garbage papers be seen as a positive signal at all?

Attendings and existing residents are consulted in the ranking process, they are picking people they will have to work pretty closely with for 4 years, they have skin in the game. Why does anyone put any weight on such a clearly bogus metric?

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

#83

Post by estearum »

SoftTalker wrote: post #80
georgeburdell wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Due to the high trust they get from the public, I have run into many MDs who are used to making unfounded assertions with little pushback.

Why is this? MDs are among the people I trust the least, along with lawyers, financial advisors, and real-estate agents.

Information asymmetry

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

#84

Post by TallGuyShort »

bigmattystyles wrote: post #78

I’m currently facing a severe health condition and I can’t help but ask various LLMs about it. They all will eventually offer solutions or avenues that sound promising or ‘easy’ when I know better, that the path ahead of me is hard, however they will non-chalantly offer a path forward they insist will work. The best part is when it cites commercial websites promotional statements as facts, though it will also misinte…

I was having a conversation with someone about AI taking over medical jobs the other day, and one of the things that came out of my thoughts about it is related:

It obviously has flaws, and we should never stop trying to improve it, but I think AI can be a great way to help connect a bunch of information they have to a bunch of information they don't, or to help spot patterns and potential avenues that they happened to miss. And obviously you want to be careful about becoming over-reliant on it, or being too trusting when it can be wrong. But I think we've been at the point for a long time where a doctor using a search engine to find medical literature should be a very reasonable thing to do, and I think AI can at least be an incremental (but massive) improvement on that workflow.

But I hope the end result of that is that doctors can not only deliver better (and maybe better-informed and more open-minded) treatment, but can spend the time focusing on patient care, managing expectations / risk management around uncertainty, managing the emotions inherent in someone who may be losing their life or the lives of their loved ones. Those are things AI is definitely not well-equipped to do as you point out.

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

#85

Post by TallGuyShort »

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.

I disagree - there's already a reproducibility crises in the literature of many fields. And medical adjacent-field like nutrition science are among the worst. I think the trends in our culture of people going against medical professionals and "doing their own research" (poorly, and from poor sources) is a net harm on society, and things like the reproducibility crisis and genuinely misleading studies described in the article only serve to harm and dilute the legitimate work done in the field and feed into that cycle. If even "research" by qualified professionals is actually allowed to be garbage by the responsible institutions, we truly are doomed.. It does no good to do discovery if you can't refine or even validate those discoveries.

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

#86

Post by dekhn »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #13
niekmaas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can be a PI without having a PhD?

I've seen this a few times- for example, my manager at Berkeley Lab was a PI but only had an undergrad degree. This is very rare, however.

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

#87

Post by dekhn »

gowld wrote: post #72
mishellaneous wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a friend of a friend who did a stint in biomedical academia told me that the researchers in their field did not hold research coming from the medicine community in high regard

How can you tell when you are reading a paper?

The author list will show "M.D." instead of (or in addition to) "Ph.D.". The paper terminology will be skewed towards medical terms.

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

#89

Post by jmalicki »

fluidcruft wrote: post #74
tstactplsignore wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

MD doctors (and even to a large extent DO doctors nowadays) are philosophically grounded on science. An MD fundamentally practices science. That used to be one of the key differences between MD and DO physicians, but science has been so successful at advancing the standard of care that DOs cannot ignore it anymore. That's just to say that MDs are expected to be fluent in science and it's not some arbitrary expectatio…

An MD does not practice science.

Science is a process of discovering new knowledge through experiments.

An MD is much more akin to an engineer that applies scientific knowledge (and yes, some proportion of both MDs and engineers do create new knowledge through experiments and thus do science, but it's not the baseline expectation).

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

#90

Post by thegrim33 »

tstactplsignore wrote: post #59
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…

>> MD doctors poll at extraordinarily high levels of trust

"1966–2012: Historical Harris Polls show a steady long-term erosion, with "great confidence" in the leaders of medicine dropping from 73% to 34% over these decades."

"2021–2024: According to Gallup data, the perceived "honesty and ethics" of doctors fell 14 points, dropping to 53%—the lowest seen since the mid-1990s."

"2024–Present: Major Johns Hopkins University / JAMA Network Open research highlights an overall institutional drop from 71.5% in April 2020 down to 40.1% across socioeconomic groups"

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