Why not 0.06?
Steve Accera asked me an interesting question a few months back. Why is 0.05 the cut-off for a p-value to be considered statistically significant?
To understand the answer to this question, we first have to talk about how to interpret a p-value in the first place. For the expanded explanation, click here. Read More...
You are going to die.
So there’s been ANOTHER study on some food and mortality. Last time, it was red meat. This time, it’s eggs. To be honest, I’m not even going to read it. (Ok, I lied. I read it. Who are we kidding?) It’s not the first study on eggs. It won’t be the last. And it definitely won’t be the last study of its kind in terms of trying to link what is really a very small part of life to mortality.
Being in medicine (yes, even in plastic surgery) has taught me a lot of thing, but one sure-fire experience is death, and dying. Most people in our society get very limited exposure to death, and fewer to dying. Most of us will only experience death when family members or friends die, which hopefully isn’t that frequent. Very few people have experienced dying–not many people sit with the dying anymore (in my experience). Some of us will personally face death prematurely, but recover, which may or may not change our view on life. Read More...
My tennis elbow protocol: For posterity’s sake.
A long time ago, but not so far away, I did a PhD. My area of expertise is primarily in research methods and biostatistics, but you can’t do a degree in methods and stats without a content area, so my content area is musculoskeletal health–which does carry over to what I do now (how about that?) Since I wanted to focus on developing and experimenting with new research methods and analytical techniques, I picked a disease that was very common, so that I wouldn’t run into recruitment issues; because there’s nothing worse than putting a year’s worth of work into writing a protocol, getting ethics approval, funding and everything in place only to find that it’s going to take the next 8 years to meet your sample size. So to avoid this problem, I picked tennis elbow, because everyone and their dog has tennis elbow. And there are no magic bullets to treat tennis elbow.
I learned a lot in that PhD (there’s a mild understatement.) I keep learning now. But out of that PhD arose my opinion on how to treat tennis elbow. At one point, there was a post on jpfitness.com that outlined the protocol, but it seems to have vanished. And recently, Scott Baptie was interested in at least reading about it and I had no where to point him. So, for posterity’s sake, here’s my protocol for tennis elbow. Read More...
Hunger don’t give a sh*t
Last weekend I had the distinct privilege of being treated to a phenomenal meal at a Brazilian Barbeque restaurant. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to one, but it. Is. Amazing. Imagine if you will, a coaster with a red and green side. Flip the coaster to green and within minutes, servers carrying one of 9 types/cuts of meat on swords arrive to offload sizeable amounts of meat onto your plate. As much as you want until you flip that coaster to red. That is a crapton of meat. I had to flip my coaster to red out of surrender at one point because they just kept coming and I could not keep up (don’t worry, I did flip it back to green after I cleared my plate.)
Point being that if there was actually a medical condition and not just a colloquial term known as a “meat coma”, I would have been in one. I have no idea how many calories that meal was, but it was a LOT. Read More...
You don’t add higher octane gas to the house that’s on fire to put it out.
The World Health Organization’s definition of health, which I had to memorize in the first month of medical school, is, “The state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
Personally, I think this is ridiculous because it’s basically tautological. The term “well-being” is essentially synonymous with “health”. In fact, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “well-being” as, “The state of being happy, healthy or prosperous.” Way to go, 1948 WHO’er’s. It’s like looking in the dictionary for the definition of “happy” and seeing “not sad” and then looking up “sad” and seeing its definition as “not happy.” (Flashbacks to being the child of immigrant parents inserted here. And yes, I was a weird kid and yes, my parents will tell you that.) Read More...
How many sprinters does it take to change a lightbulb, or what about important but not significant?
I often have discussions with non-methodologists about statistics and research methods. What can I say, it’s what I do. Statistics is one of those things that everyone has to learn, but most people feel they just don’t understand. So, instead of trying to understand it, they create hard-and-fast rules for themselves to get around it. It’s like chronic double-clickers; you know, that one person you know at work or in your family that double-clicks EVERYTHING, and doesn’t know how to right-click? Generally, it’s people who don’t understand, or aren’t comfortable with computers. They know that some things require double-clicks and it seems to work most of the time, so instead of figuring out that hyperlinks only need one click, they just double-click everything. And they use the menus for everything, including cutting and pasting, because they find CTRL-C and CTRL-V to be too advanced, and even after you show them several times that, “Hey, look how much faster it is to do it this way!” they say something like, “That’s too complicated for me,” but won’t relinquish the mouse or keyboard to you, and then still complain that, “It takes forever to do that on a computer.” And no, this is definitely not my dad. In any way whatsoever. In the research world, it’s similar–people who ONLY use ANOVAs, or rely on normality statistics to figure out if a distribution is normal (just graph it!) for instance…but I’m getting off topic.
There is the argument that statistics limit progress, or that the requirement for something to be statistically shown is restricting because there can be small, but important effects in small populations, therefore making it mathematically very difficult to “obtain” a p-value less than 0.05. Read More...
Post hoc ergo propter hoc (Or, does shit happen because Zeus is angry?)
I’m sitting at Equinox on 44th Street (Thanks, Equinox for letting me work out at another gym other than my own in this mess!) writing this because I have to wait another hour for everything I own to be recharged (thanks, Sandy). However, it’s amazing what pops into one’s head in silence, darkness and no Internetz. Unfortunately, it also means no actual study review, since I can’t seem to reliably get online (that, and I’m feeling a bit lazy, so someone send me a link, eh?)
In case, you haven’t figured it out, my life in on hold while they try to restore power to my area of Manhattan. One of the hospitals I work at has actually evacuated all the patients, and the other main one I work at is running on emergency power only (no labs, no computers, minimal lights). Read More...
Just because it’s brown, doesn’t mean it’s chocolate
This blog entry comes courtesy of John Woodslave who posted the link on my Facebook page.
Martin Bland’s “How to Upset the Statistical Referee” should be mandatory reading for all researchers. It’s short, gets to the point and, if everyone paid ACTUAL attention to it, would kill this blog. Read More...
This study makes no claims. But I bet other people will.
In the fitness industry, everyone’s trying to get or stay ahead. And while there are lots of ways to do that, tapping into published research is one of the more common ways to “reveal” something new and come across as being more leading edge than the next guy/girl.
I would argue that most people who post links to PubMed haven’t read the actual study, but are just browsing abstracts. I’ve written about what abstracts are good for in the past. But it’s been a while since I’ve really taken the theme up. Read More...
The lime in the coconut is purely optional.
Before I even start explaining what I’ve done here, I want to make it absolutely clear that this analysis is fairly casual, and that by no means have I followed a text-book rigourous protocol to do it because if I HAD done that, you wouldn’t be reading this for another year while it waited in the publication queue of some nutrition journal. However, I will say that even with that disclaimer, I’ve probably been a bit more rigourous than a lot of crap I’ve read, so…well, there really isn’t anything more to say, is there?
Back in the early 2000’s there was a small surge of medium-chain-triglyercide (MCT) research that petered out around 2003ish. While there were a fair number of human trials looking at MCT’s and lipid profiles, there were also a handful of trials that also examined the effect of MCTs on body composition, specifically fat loss. And while MCTs are used in some supplements and meal-replacement shakes, there hasn’t been a widespread adoption of MCTs like there was when olive oil got really big (also in the early 2000’s), and I have to say that it’s not entirely clear as to why. Part of the reason might have been the sparseness of human trials involving MCTs compared to those looking at olive oil. Since 2009, however, there appears to be another blip of human trials looking at MCTs, and specifically at coconut oil, or mixes that involve a fair amount of coconut oil. Read More...