Science Without Sense: The Risky Business of Public Health ResearchForget about science, the scientific method and all that other junk you learned before: this is the guide for the public-health superstar wanna-be! |
Contents
| 5 | |
| 11 | |
The Significance of Significance | 17 |
Data Collection | 21 |
Mining for Statistical Associations | 25 |
The Mixmaster Technique | 29 |
Instant Risk | 33 |
The Big Risk Number | 37 |
Peer Review | 47 |
The Final Document | 51 |
Where to Publish | 53 |
Dealing with Criticism | 55 |
A Final Word | 59 |
Lexicon | 61 |
ABOUT THE AUTHOR | 65 |
Cooking Up Biological Plausibility | 39 |
Common terms and phrases
95 percent level American atomic bomb attributable risk bioassay biological plausibility cancer rates cancer risk case-control studies Cato Institute chemical plant workers cluster cohort studies confidence interval criticism Data dredge diesel exhaust dioxin toxicology dose drinking environmental tobacco smoke epidemiologic studies epidemiology example expo exposed hazardous waste hazardous waste sites health research community high fat diet hot dogs ignore increase in risk increased risk instant risk intuitive ionizing radiation leukemia levels of exposure linear nonthreshold model looking lung cancer meta-analysis Milloy nonsmoking women Obesity p-value peer review percent confidence pesticides pick the right poison population premature death prove public health community public health research Publication bias published radon rats remember right risk risk assessment risk factors risk of premature species statistical association statistically significant statisticians Superfund target technique Texas Sharpshooter there's thing type of epidemiologic unprovable weak association writeup
Popular passages
Page 1 - I grossly underestimated the initiative of the entrepreneurs in our public health community. In fact, there's something of a gold rush going on in public health today. Thanks to the general public's neuroses about health, some strategic fearmongering, and, of course, political considerations, public health has struck it rich — to the tune of billions of dollars in annual revenues.
Page 4 - This guide has everything you need to know about how to create a risk that will electrify the public, launch you into the pantheon of public health and land those big fat research grants from the federal government.
Page 5 - This risk is so small that it could never be scientifically shown to exist. It would take a study with at least 500 million subjects — about two times the current US population — to prove such a small risk exists.