Hello, and welcome to The Own Your Health Podcast,
I'm Cyndi Lynne, and I can't wait to
help you step into your health power.
Today we're going to talk about clinical studies.
And I get at least once a week, a client
or a listener sending me a study that they see
in a magazine or in some other spot see on
the Internet, and they say, what does this mean?
This is different than what we've
talked about, or this sounds strange.
And it's very often because
there's very dramatic headlines.
And I thought it would be helpful today for us
to go through five ways that you can look at
studies that you see from wherever and get an idea
of how credible they might or might not be.
So five things.
First of all, when you look at a
study beyond the headline, look at who's paying.
Now, this is trickier to get to than it
has been in the past because now many government
agencies like the NIH - the National Institute for Health,
is subsidized and funded heavily by pharmaceutical companies.
But it helps to look at who's paying for the
study, and it might give you some idea if they're
biased as to what they want the outcome to be.
Second of all, who's doing the reporting?
Where is the actual raw information
coming from that the study coordinators
are using to draw their conclusions?
Is it coming from lab results
taken in a clinic or hospital?
Is it coming from patient reporting?
If it's coming from patient or participant reporting, you have
to take it with a little bit of grain of
salt, because when it comes to reporting how much we're
eating, how much we exercise, how often we take our
supplements, as humans, we can be pretty fallible.
Even with the best of intentions, we can get
a little bit confused, a little bit mixed up,
and have a little bit of selective memory.
So who's reporting the information?
Where did it come from?
Number three, is there an oversimplification?
Are they looking at one tiny piece of something
that works as part of a bigger puzzle?
For example, many of the studies I see
on vitamin D are just studying vitamin D.
They're studying whether their participants are
taking it or not taking it.
They don't look at cofactors, at other, other nutrients,
other potential supplements that need to be taken with
vitamin D in order for it to be useful.
So they'll take just one piece of the puzzle, or
they'll look at just one piece of the one piece
of information, like the amount of time reported for those
exercising without looking at intensity or frequency.
So is there an oversimplification in the study
that led them to their big headline.
Number four, are they looking to create, are
they looking to show causation or correlation?
Causation means is what they're doing in the study
causing a particular outcome, or does it just happen
that those two things occur at the same time?
So a really good example,
correlation is rain and umbrellas.
When it rains, you tend to see a lot of umbrellas.
And in fact, when it doesn't rain,
you don't see hardly any umbrellas.
But does that mean that umbrellas cause rain?
No, absolutely not.
That's correlation.
So, is the study looking to show one thing
causes another, or is it looking to show these
two things happen at the same time?
Both can be good for a study as
long as they acknowledge what they're looking for.
When you see a strong correlation, that often leads
to further studies that can show or disprove causation.
Number five, does the conclusion fit?
So often we see headlines, because
after all headlines sell, excess amounts
of vitamin whatever can be dangerous.
But when you read the study and look
at it, very often, the conclusion is that
supplementing with this particular vitamin has not shown
any benefit compared to not supplementing.
Okay, maybe they didn't
provide much in supplementation.
Maybe they never got to a
useful, effective level in supplementation.
But their own words, their own
conclusion, didn't say anything about danger.
So, is the headline, is the title of the
study really reflecting what they found in the conclusion?
So again, the five steps, who's paying to
gather this information? Who's reporting the information
and how reliable is that particular source?
Number three, is it oversimplified?
And obviously, you don't want to study with a lot of
different things going on, but you do need to look at
an entire puzzle and not just one random piece.
And then finally, five, does the conclusion fit what the
study was about, or did someone take some creative license
in drawing a conclusion or creating a title that was
far beyond what the actual study shows?
So keep those studies coming.
If you have questions, I'm always
glad to look them over.
But these are some of the criteria,
these are the top five criteria that I
look at when I read a study.
Sit down with this list, the next study you
get, and you will become a better consumer of
all of the healthcare information that's out there.
So I hope this helps. Check in,
keep the studies coming, and until next
week, let's go out and own it.
