The only other contact between lay people and medical research is the media - whose summaries of research are, IMO, far worse then just reading the reports yourself.
The thing is, people are exposed all the time to information which they haven't had adequate training to make sense of. That says much less about the general capacity of people then it says about our educational system.
As someone who went to school with doctors studying medical research, my sense is that doctors aren't much better at making sense of the research then anyone else. They understand medical part of it, but they often don't have a good grasp of the research part of it.
Yet another reason why there ought to be an epidemiologist in every doctor's office
The thing is, people are exposed all the time to information which they haven't had adequate training to make sense of. That says much less about the general capacity of people then it says about our educational system.
As someone who went to school with doctors studying medical research, my sense is that doctors aren't much better at making sense of the research then anyone else. They understand medical part of it, but they often don't have a good grasp of the research part of it.
Yet another reason why there ought to be an epidemiologist in every doctor's office
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