‘When it comes to describing medical findings, researchers may need to tone it down a bit, according to a group of heart journal editors’.
"It’s a plea to not get ahead of the evidence," said Dr. Christopher Cannon, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston and one of a group of cardiology journal editors publishing a statement this week.
"It’s perfectly fine to look at these studies and say ‘we should study this further,’ but if you say ‘this is good’ or ‘this is bad,’ and people start changing their practice before there’s really the right answer, that’s not good."
There’s a difference between observational studies – which simply watch subjects over a period of time – and randomized controlled clinical trials, which typically randomly assign patients to an active ingredient or placebo ("dummy pill"), often without subjects knowing what they’re taking.
In other words Epidemology is not to be taken as fact.
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