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Short pieces on reading health research: what the numbers mean, what kind of study you are looking at, and which questions to ask. No paywall, no newsletter wall.
- “Linked to” is not “causes”: correlation and causation in health newsWhy people who do one thing differ in other ways, how that fooled a generation of doctors, and the one question that separates a link from a cause.
- 12 questions to ask before you believe a health claimWas it tested in humans? Compared to what? Who paid? Twelve questions that take most health claims apart, in the order to ask them.
- How to read a health research paper: start at the backSkip the abstract. Read the methods, then the results table, then the conclusion. A reading order for health papers that anyone can learn in an afternoon.
- How to use ChatGPT or Claude to read a medical study, and catch it when it’s wrongAI assistants summarise the abstract and call it the paper. How to make one quote the paper, and a two-minute check that catches its mistakes.
- Mice are not small people: what “tested in the lab” really meansA result in a dish or a mouse is where research starts, not where it ends. How to tell how far a health claim has actually travelled.
- Number needed to treat, explained with one divisionNumber needed to treat tells you how many people take something for one of them to benefit. How to work it out from any study, and what it can't tell you.
- Questions to ask your doctor about a new medicine, test or treatmentAppointments are short and the questions arrive after you leave. Two well-tested question sets, and how to get the numbers you need.
- Relative risk vs absolute risk: the two numbers behind every health headline“Cuts your risk in half” can mean one person in a thousand or twenty in a hundred. How to find the two numbers that tell them apart.