STEP 1, read properly, fifteen years after everyone stopped reading it

Started 30 November 2024 · 15 replies · 196 hearts · read 4.1k times

NkemPort Harcourt, NG · 30 November 2024

1.6 years ago

STEP 1, read properly, fifteen years after everyone stopped reading it Writing it down partly to work out what I actually think.

Putting this here because I do not want to be sold anything, I want to know what is actually established.

I would like to know what the best single piece of human evidence is, because I suspect the honest answer is thinner than the discussion suggests.

Evidence question. I would rather have an honest "we do not know" than a confident answer, and confident answers are all I have been able to find so far.

I am asking because two people I trust have told me opposite things and both of them cited the same study.

Happy to be told I have misread it. That would be the most useful possible outcome of this post.

PetuaKampala, UG

My honest position is that the evidence base for the main compounds is genuinely substantial and the evidence for a great deal else is not.

SaoirseKilkenny, IE

What helped was somebody explaining confidence intervals to me properly, once, in plain terms, and I have read differently ever since.

NadjaBelgrade, RS

Petua has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

I would say do read the supplementary material occasionally. Twice now the thing I wanted to know was only in there.

SunilFacilitatorBirmingham, UK

I am pleased with this thread. Asking what the best single piece of human evidence is tends to end in an honest "very little", and a circle where nobody minds saying so is rarer than it ought to be.

NilsUppsala, SE

What surprised me was how readable most of these are once you stop being intimidated by the first page.

DevManchester, UK

Nadja said something I want to sit with for a second.

The paper we read last month had a population nothing like most of this circle, which does not make it useless and does limit what it tells us.

8me too 6

FabianBasel, CH

I would have written the same thing a year ago, word for word.

XanBerlin, DE

Something practical: I write three sentences about each paper afterwards and I now have two years of notes I actually refer back to.

RuthieLeicester, UK

I found the discussion sections the least reliable part of most papers and the results tables the most.

13me too 8

TheaBergen, NO

#10

Fabian — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

The registry entry is worth checking against the published paper, and on one occasion the outcomes we were reading were not the ones originally listed.

DoraUtrecht, NL

#11

My reading has got slower and better. I get through a quarter of what I used to and I understand considerably more of it.

GwendaEbbw Vale, UK

#12

Something worth knowing: the difference between a trial and an observational study changes what you can conclude, and I did not know that two years ago.

GwilymCaernarfon, UK

#13

Thea — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

What I would flag is that a study in a different population may not transfer, and that is a limitation rather than a criticism.

SunilFacilitatorBirmingham, UK

#14

Gently redirecting: the question was about a specific measurement and we have spent six replies on a different measurement.

PamSouthport, UK

#15

Gwilym said something I want to sit with for a second.

The session where we read a paper about something none of us takes was the most useful, because nobody was defending a position.