| Welcome to the wonderful world of epidemiology. |
| Just when you figured that you had mastered the mysteries of pulmonary blood flow, cardiac rhythms, electrolyte balance, gut motility, and cerebral anatomy, along came this strange guy in a tweed jacket muttering formulas, statistics, and foreign-sounding words like "relative risk," "positive predictive value," and "Mantel-Haenzel chi-square." He didn't look like a scientist: no dirty lab coat, scientific calculator, or long hair. He didn't look like a real doctor either: no clean lab coat, stethoscope, or designer length hair. Yet he had the arrogance to claim that he is both a clinician and a scientist he is a clinical epidemiologist. Amid the hushed silence in the room you can overhear desperate whispers of, "What in the world is a clinical whatever-it-is-ologist?" |
| More particularly, why, in a world already overpopulated by physiologists, pharmacologists, pathologists, gerontologists, nephrologists, cardiologists, neurologists, and a dozen other relatively legitimate art forms, do we need yet another-ologist? |
| The answer, it seems, is that somewhere in that complex, compartmentalized world that lays claim to the human body as an object of study, common sense got lost in the shuffle. The reality is that, despite a tremendous explosion in biomedical science, we still know embarrassingly little about the workings of ourselves. No one knows the cause of most diseases or the cure for that matter. No one can lay claim to the crystal ball that will predict accurately who, among a group of cancer or postmyocardial infarction patients, will survive a year. As a result, there is a considerable gap between the exact findings of the laboratory and the uncertain world of clinical medicine. This leaves enormous room for the dissemination of well-intended but useless tests, therapies, or theories. |
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