[Diabetes-talk] The Merry, Merry Month of "May"

[Mike Freeman]

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Have you ever wondered what would happen to the size of medical journals 
in general and diabetes journals in particular if their article 
submission policies would be changed so that only definitive studies 
were accepted for publication, i.e., SO THAT all findings that used the 
word "may" would be banned? I suspect the journals would be mighty thin.

I started down this line of Gedankenexperiment while reading some 
research shorts this morning in a recent issue of Diabetes Forecast. One 
study purported to say that ingestion of fat "may" assist with tasks 
involving memory; another (described in the same article) purported to 
say that a high-fat diet "may" increase dimentia.

Frankly, it's no wonder the public is confused, noncompliant and/or 
indifferent! Medical "experts" can't seem to get their stories straight!

On the one hand, qualification of research findings by using 
wiesel-words such as "may" is understandable; almost all research is, to 
a lesser or greater extent, provisional and new findings often 
contradict or modify THE OLD. But I also suspect that a large amount of 
research -- especially that involving the efficacy of various diets and 
that involving "break-throughs" in diabetes treatmen -- is more a matter 
of being the results of the "publish or perish" research ethic on the 
part of university faculties and lab scientists and clinicians than 
anything else. And the glib way much of this research is covered in the 
media doesn't help.

I am of the opinion that almost all medical research these days has 
glaring flaws in metholodogy -- especially that involving diets -- and 
that if we were to truly total up what we know for certain involving 
human metabolism, we'd be surprised at how much we don't know.

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Mike Freeman