About this course
How can you tell if the bold headlines seen on social media are truly touting the next big thing or if the article isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on?
Understanding Medical Studies, will provide you with the tools and skills you need to critically interpret medical studies, and determine for yourself the difference between good and bad science.
The course covers study-design, research methods, and statistical interpretation. It also delves into the dark side of medical research by covering fraud, biases, and common misinterpretations of data. Each lesson will highlight case-studies from real-world journal articles.
By the end of this course, you’ll have the tools you need to determine the trustworthiness of the scientific information you’re reading and, of course, whether or not your Facebook friend is wrong.
This course was made possible in part by the George M. O’Brien Kidney Center at Yale.
Syllabus
- Welcome!
- Find out what you’ll be learning and what powers you’ll have by the end of the course!
- The Basics
- Gain some foundational knowledge!
- Medical Statistics Made Ridiculously Simple
- It’s (sort of) that easy!
- Types of Medical Studies
- A test for every situation!
- How Wrong Conclusions Are Reached
- Bad plan? Bad data? Bad actors?
- Bias
- Subtle and hard to correct, Bias is the silent killer of good research.
- Fixing the Problems with Medical Studies
- All hope is not lost!