A Review of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air
A young neurosurgeon’s heartbreaking memoir is also a testament to the importance of the humanities to medical education.
Category / interdisciplinarity
Fitness Is A Story We Should Tell Differently: An Interview with Courtney Marshall
Courtney Marshall is an English Ph.D., activist, and fitness instructor. Vital interviewed her to find out more about her unique experience and how she sees the relationship between narrative and health.
What Do We Do About Medical Debates That Won’t Be Put To Bed?
Sometimes headlines tout conclusiveness when that’s not exactly how science works. Can we foster a public perception more open to the fact that medical guidelines evolve as information changes?
Peer Review isn’t the TSA: Let’s Humanize It in the Name of Science
Public deification of some infallible abstraction called “science” does a disservice to real science.
What’s needed is not only more and better scientific studies, but also a renewed understanding of how knowledge is built.
From the headlines proclaiming a state of “crisis” in both social science research and scientific peer review, it might well seem that the lyrics from a Weird Al song have come to pass: “All you need to understand is everything you know is wrong!” Or, as the inimitable Mike Pesca put it on his podcast The Gist, “An interesting new study reveals that most studies aren’t interesting, or new, or particularly revealing.” Continue reading →
The Fault in Our Stats
Noting the Social Aspects of Racial Identity in Genetic Research is Vital to Improving Healthcare
In a recent New York Times article, “Tales of African-American Identity Found in DNA,” Carl Zimmer explains that new genetic research on individuals identifying as African American confirms historical accounts and provides new details about a past that was often not recorded. It’s exciting to see that scientists are following a larger trend that can be observed in any number of fields (from genetics to history to literature), which involves an epidemiological correction, a shifting of the predominant focus of study away from males of European descent as if they were representative of the whole species. Continue reading →