How to read clinical studies about health

If you get confused by the deluge of clinical trials and studies that hit your Google or Facebook feed, you are not alone. Those studies seem to contradict each other constantly. One says that eggs are good for you while another says they aren’t. Some take aim at supplements and classify them as useless while others show clear benefits.

So how should you view clinical studies? Here are a few tips:

1) Understand that the actual takeaways will be very limited.

Clinical trials are designed to answer one specific question in a fairly limited way. For example, they are generally not going to answer questions like “Are eggs good for you?” Rather, they will answer questions like “What is the impact on blood sugar levels when men between 20 and 30 years old eat two eggs a day?”

In other words, from 10,000 feet, contradictions seem obvious, but when you really dig in, contradictions may not exist at all. That leads us to the second point.

2) Pretty much ignore the headlines/stories in popular online sources. Read credible summaries or the study results themselves.

Imagine the headline on a popular news site if a study did find that men between 20-30 saw a slight increase in blood sugar levels when eating eggs. There would be little nuance, and you would see something like this: “Study shows that men should not eat eggs.”

If you want to actually know the results of a study, you have to get into the weeds and read the study, or at least, a solid, unbiased summary of the study results.

3) Look at the funding.

This is obvious. Companies fund studies to support their products. Often, these studies are fairly credible but still slanted. Furthermore, it is reasonable to believe that unfavorable studies will be quashed while favorable studies will be elevated in the media.

4) Watch your bias.

If you love coffee, it might be easy to discount studies that show negative results about coffee while eagerly posting studies that tout coffee benefits on your Facebook profile. We humans are wired that way.

Be careful about letting your bias control what you will accept as truth. Be willing to change your mind.

5) Trust legitimate studies, but accept that they may be wrong.

Unless you are a medical professional that specializes in the area that a study is focused on, you probably do not have the capacity to prove that study results are wrong. Armchair quarterbacks are not real quarterbacks.

That is not to say you cannot head to the internet and find people that agree with you that the study is wrong; of course you can! But why should you accept those opinions any more than the study results themselves? “Trust but verify” is a very flawed concept in general in 2022 because the sources you use to verify have to be verified too. It is a very tangled web indeed.

Our modernist society puts trust in science for a reason; when done correctly, science follows a rigorous process for deriving truth. Therefore, if a legitimate study is done by a legitimate group, it is reasonable to trust the results.

On the flip side, those legitimate results may be wrong and often will be. That is just the way it works; truth is hard to ascertain sometimes.

However, just because clinical studies are sometimes wrong does not mean that they are not the best way we know of in 2022 to try to answer questions about health. Clinical studies are a great tool that we have all benefited from.

So, feel free to accept the results of studies while understanding that you may have to change your mind down the road. Hold that knowledge loosely, but pay attention to it. Our life expectancy has almost doubled over the past few centuries, largely because of the scientific process.