Post-Conference Thoughts

Just returned from the conference, had a few thoughts.

1) Heated seats are possibly the best things in the world when you're driving for extended periods of time in the winter.

2) The conference was in Quebec and while it's been a while since I used it, I though my French was at least passable. It's not. Not even close.

3) A good portion of the conference was dedicated to a handful of topics and I found myself reminded of this comic:

(SMBC)

I don't mean to disparage the work of the conference attendees, most of whom had far more complex work to present than I did and generally presented it better as well, but there did seem to be a lot of energy devoted to one or two topics in medicine with little attention paid to other meaningful research pursuits.

Part of this is the nature of the conference of course, no conference is universal in scope even when restricted to certain disciplines, but it's true for research in general as well. Some topics seem to get an inordinate amount of attention and funding, even for relatively trivial aspects of that subject, while other fields are almost devoid of attention.

This would be reasonable if those areas of research with intense activity answered the key questions reliably, but that doesn't necessarily happen. There are a lot of low-quality studies out there, ones that address the question, but come with so many asterisks that the conclusions are not necessarily reliable. Such studies can be useful when first addressing a problem - they can provide descriptive information, generate hypotheses, and identify research areas clearly not worth pursuing. Yet, once a field has been established, these studies can only pick at the margins, rather than provide any real clarity.

For all the time, energy, and resources put into the research presented at the conference, one good RCT or high-quality cohort study would likely have been more meaningful. That would require concentrating resources, however, while the current model for research funding tends to spread out resources between groups. That means a lot of researchers producing necessarily flawed studies because none of them can afford to do a high-quality one.

In a lot of activities, I've found you get credit either for doing something exceptionally well, or doing something exceptionally unique. Research appears to be much the same. I do hope to get to do that high-quality, question-answering research in the future, when I have a bit more clout than I do as a pre-clerkship MD candidate. For now, doing relatively unique research has been quite interesting and, I hope, useful.

P.S. Oh yeah, this. An exaggeration? Yes. A huge exaggeration? Nope...

(Ari Friedman via The Incidental Economist)