How to find good science

There's a TON of medical information on the Internet, and it can be hard to figure out what to trust when you're Googling something your doctor said. Here are a few things that can help you evaluate what you find to make sure you're getting correct info.

Disclaimer: I'm not a medical person, I'm just a data nerd. If in doubt, PLEASE speak to your personal medical team.

Check credentials
Most articles will have a byline somewhere, so take a look for the author. The best information will come from someone with clinical experience or a research science degree, so look for initials. Bonus points if there's a summary-- "Dr. Bob has been performing surgeries since 2001" carries a lot more weight than "Bob had surgery six months ago."

Trust "the man"
Say what you will about politics, but the US government is pretty good at assembling large groups of very smart people to make recommendations. Groups like the FDA (food and drug administration), USDA (US department of agriculture), the CDC (center for disease control), and NIH (national institute of health) have a history of putting out reliable information and research.

Hooray for peer review!
Scientific journals and papers from professional associations go through "peer review" and are more trustworthy, and it's a gold standard for research. This means that people submit their findings and they're read by several people who are knowledgeable in the same field. (Ex: a gastro doc does research on gut bacteria, and three other doctors with experience in bacteria read it to see if they can see any problems.) If they see any major issues-- funky data, problems with the method, whatever-- then the paper won't be published as-is. This is a very helpful set of balances.

Buyer beware
Is the source of your information trying to sell you something? Health information is full of quacks trying to make a quick buck, so someone who wants you to pay for information, products, etc. probably has a vested interest in making you accept their POV. (I'm looking at you, Dr. Mercola!)

What's the method?
Personal anecdotes are great, but a large pool of uniformly-collected observations are the best. When you're reading a research summary, here are some things to look out for:

• Lots of observations (or cases), such as the number of patients included in a study. If you consider only three people, you may miss big trends or make wrong assumptions. 30 people is enough to make a good generalization, and the bigger the number the better.
  
  
• Data parameters, or the rules applied to what the researchers are looking at. Does the study consider only patients who've been post-op for several years? Only one type of surgery? People of a certain health status, gender/age/race/etc.? This gives context for the "universe" of where the research can be applied.
  
  
• How confident are the researchers in their finding? This is usually the last bit of an abstract (research summary) at the top of an article. Conclusions can range from "we found a definite connection" to "this is interesting but we can't prove it without more research." Make sure they're confident!
  
  
• If it's a literature review, where the researchers look over everything previously written and give a summary or suggest new stuff, see how much they were able to find and how critically they looked at it.

Apply!

Here's an article I pulled from PubMed: Understanding the Capacity for Exercise in Post-Bariatric Patients, and how to figure it out.

• This article comes from "Obesity Surgery." Google tells me that this is the "official journal of the International Federation for the Surgery of Obesity and metabolic disorders. Sounds legit!
• When you click on the authors' names, you see other articles they've been involved in. Looks like these are people who've done a BUNCH of research on the topic!
• The study looks at 51 patients and (a good group), 44 of whom finished the study, within 6 - 24 months of surgery. That's a pretty consistent group.
• The authors compared people using an exercise program to people who DIDN'T use an exercise program. They're able to compare apples to apples, since both groups were very similar. If the groups were different in another way (one all female, one all male), then you couldn't be certain that the exercise was the thing that caused your results.

Nicely done!

Nerd on Sparklekitty...we LOVE it 

Thanks for the info! 

This is great.  I see so many people, including the media, try to draw conclusions from a bad study.  I look at all the things you mentioned when I evaluate how seriously I should take a study's results. Thanks for taking the time to share.

Great post!

One thing to add tho, be wary of even peer reviewed stuff. Some journals basically let you buy your way into publishing (I'm a scientist and get at least 3 emails a day about publishing in Journal of XYZ for the low price of $4000). There's a journal index factor called an "impact factor" and in general, the better the journal, the higher the score (it's based on several things, including how many times a particular article is cited in another article). If you think the journal may be dubious, you can certainly investigate its impact.

Oh geez, I'd totally forgotten about "pay to publish." Can't tell if there's more or less of that in sociology than in natural sciences, but it can still be pretty ridiculous.