Wishful Thinking

I learned recently that it is easier to go through pain yourself than to watch your children be in pain. Anyone who has held their own eight month old baby while a nurse was drawing blood will know what I am talking about. My baby was screaming his head off and trying to get out of my iron grip, all the while looking straight into my eyes as if to ask me "Is this what you reward me with for all the trust I place in you?"

I felt like I had let him down.
And I can tell you, its much harder than letting yourself down.
Or letting your parents down.

 And then I remembered Theranos. That little company I had read about whose founder hated to have blood drawn and so was launching this company that could stop this whole process and conduct tests with blood from just pin pricks. Just what I am looking for. Just what any parent will be looking for.

I couldnt resist looking up how much progress they had made once I came back home. Unfortunately they dont seem to be doing that well. I hope they turn around though - such a shame to have to insert needles into every baby just to have them tested :( 

The trouble with "doing your own research"

For the last few months I have been hearing the words "do your own research" quite a few times. It was given to me as sensible no nonsense advice by a few colleagues when I was pondering over some medical issues I was having at the time. Usually the advice means "ignore what the doctor is saying, go and read some medical literature yourself".

I was surprised by the suggestion, because from my perspective, the doctor knows best. I rarely question their opinion and authority, if I think a particular doctor is not good enough I just go to another one after checking their credentials. In no circumstance would I bother to sit and read medical literature all by myself. Yet that is what folks around me seem to do - they search and find the latest research on any given medical issue, spend a lot of time understanding whatever those conclusions are and then accept that as the truth. They seem to think that it is the right way to make decisions - by reading all available material on their own exhaustively and then coming to a conclusion on their own. In my mind, this is nonsensical, because to me that is what the doctor is supposed to do - I am paying the doctor so they will do all this for me. What then is the point of me spending all that time reading stuff up on my own? And what makes people think that they can somehow know better than someone who went through years of specific training to be able to make these types of decisions?

Yet here we are - more and more people insisting that they know better than doctors because they have "done their own research". I wonder what causes them to depend so much on their own research. I wonder if they have paused to think about what "doing my own research" really means. To me if one really had to do one's own research, one would have to set up a lab, devise a scientifically sound experiment to prove or test whatever it is that one is curious about and get the funding and carry out the experiment on your own. None of the folks talking about "Doing one's own research" is doing that. Instead they are simply reading published papers and believing that it is the absolute truth - how do they know it was not cooked up? Why is reading the paper somehow "doing one's own research"? Dont they know that a lot of experimental results are fabricated anyway?

I wish people would give more thought into what they call "research" before labelling their literature survey as "research".