Avoiding Subjectivity in Medical Studies

Statistics A-Ha Moment The author of this brief reflection has been learning or reabsorbing a number of terms and concepts throughout the duration of the applicable class being completed. During that time, there has been some things that have just made sense and did not take a lot of brainpower or epiphany to make sense of. However, there have been other things that are much more vexing and hard to fathom.

The author of this report will focus on one of the latter and the "a-ha!" moment that revealed a revelation. This revelation centers on qualitative studies that are based on perception and opinion and how hard those can be to do properly given how perceptions and feelings can quite easily differ from person to person for even the same phenomenon or even.

While medical tests that use a measurement of pain are hard to do right and well, the chapter material covered in this class does prove there is a way to pull it off. Analysis The "a-ha!" moment that the author of this report will focus on comes from the material in chapter six. Specifically, the author was scanning through the "Presenting Problem 2" item.

As indicated in the first paragraph of the problem and the introduction of this report, the nexus of what was being assessed was the experiencing of pain and cramping when it comes to cervical intraepithelial neoplasia and the associated cryosurgery that can be done to address it. What caught the eye of the author of this report initially is that there is rating of pain that was done so as to measure the performance of drugs like lidocaine, epinephrine and so forth.

Subsequent to that, there is to be a measurement of the patient's pain. The author of this report has always thought out about this because people obviously have different pain thresholds. Perhaps this sort of variance can be "smoothed" out with a large sample size and the like. However, the outliers and such that would be in such a group are going to have some effect on the results even if that affect is nominal and minimal (Dawson & Trapp, 2004).

However, the author came to see the mention of the visual analog scale, or VAS, in the text. Rather than rely solely on subjective and perhaps inaccurate ways of assessing pain, there apparently has been a tool developed to measure the pain experienced in a way that is statistically reliable and fruitful. Indeed, the study people took the results of the VAS and use a chi-square statistical analysis to compute the results (Hawker, Mian, Kendzerska & French, 2011).

While a placebo was not used, there was a clear "does it work or does it not" between one intervention and not using that same intervention. While a placebo might have been useful for the same reasons as self-perception skewing results and what is actually going on may be useful, the study as it was done is certainly sufficient. Indeed, there has been evidence that people will think they are getting treatment while they are not.

Perhaps the omission was on purpose to avoid the phenomenon that the author of this report was citing. Regardless, the author of this report was not aware that there were tools and tricks to avoid skewing of results and bad data in general. Apparently, the author of this report was mistaken but the author is happy to be wrong in this instance as it proves that research and the statistics that go into the same are sound and proven (Dawson & Trapp, 2004).

Conclusion The human and perception element that is involved.