So the guy is told that migraines generally improve as you age. He goes to this specialist, and there's minimal progress for three years, and then later things get better. How do we know any of this is causative?
More generally, do journalists without scientific training need to consult with anyone before declaring who we should be praising for health improvements?
More generally, do journalists without scientific
training need to consult with anyone before declaring
who we should be praising for health improvements?
>Atul Gawande (born November 5, 1965) is an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In public health, he is executive director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit that works on reducing deaths in surgery globally.[2]
>He has written extensively on medicine and public health for The New Yorker and Slate, and is the author of the books Complications, Better, The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal.
Another child post has addressed your concerns about the lack of scientific training in journalism, so I won't address it other than to say I was incredibly amused to see this charge levied at Gawande of all people.
But on your point, this is exactly the thing that Gawande was mystified by in this article. He noticed a trend of people with better primary care relationships having better outcomes despite there not being an immediately identifiable causal link.
Knowing his style, Gawande will probably start testing this pretty soon with his Ariadne Labs group and publish into a high impact journal when they identify causal explanations.
Obviously, the modified criticism is that the author knows better than to appeal to this kind of anecdote. It doesn't even play a role in hypothesis generation. He's persuading the reader without teaching them, a mistake that can and is made by the even most accomplished people.
The article is about how primary care physicians help people, and so the author includes a section about a person who thinks that a primary care physician helped him.
This form of the written word is generally known in English as "journalism."
It's a pretty standard journalistic anecdote to focus the narrative of the story. If you want the hard data, read the medical literature. He does refer abstractly to studies, but doesn't provide any links (though again, unfortunately, this is pretty standard).
Except that's kinda the point, right? Not that there is a cure, but that seeing someone and having support is... helpful. He didn't argue that she cured his headaches...
More generally, do journalists without scientific training need to consult with anyone before declaring who we should be praising for health improvements?