Epidemiology Is a Very Useful

Epidemiology is a very useful study when properly applied in all medical and health care fields. According to the World Health Organization, epidemiology is the study of the distribution and determinants of health-related states or events (including disease), and the application of this study to the control of diseases and other health problems. Various methods can be used to carry out epidemiological investigations: surveillance and descriptive studies can be used to study distribution; analytical studies are used to study determinants."

In more simple terms, epidemiology looks for causes. Medicine and health care treatments appear to be lacking in this particular area of study. Risk factors and symptoms are often substituted for causality within medicine, delaying the healing process if addressing it all. While treating symptoms and risk factors becomes very economically beneficial to the for-profit medical complexes of the world, this approach fails the patient at many levels.

Epidemiology, which seeks to find causes should not be dismissed and marginalized as a complicated term and thrown away. Medicine and health care treatment stands to benefit at an enormous level if this collective field became serious and honest in their approaches to healing and treating those who have fallen ill.

It appears that most health care workers are not really interested in root causes of problems and seek to take profitable and easy routes to healing. Each person is unique and comes from a unique set of circumstances. Causality cannot be generalized to the point as it is today. America is largely full of sick people navigating their lives with chronic illness. These disturbing trends suggest, to me at least, that causality and epidemiology is being ignored at some primitive and obvious level that no one likes to talk about. As long as for-profit health care systems are available, root causes of diseases will most likely be ignored.

References.

"Epidemiology." World Health Organization. Viewed 13 April, 2013. Retrieved from http://www.who.int/topics/epidemiology/en/

2. Qualitative research, and qualitative understanding, is very useful in translating certain ideas into words that can be more readily understood by the researcher. Quality is understood as a subjective term and by trying to model quality into a form that can be translated mathematically allows this type of data to be manipulated and crafted to fit certain arguments. Descriptive terms such as good and bad are relative terms and qualitative analysis seeks to standardize these terms in order to communicate their understanding of these terms to more complex and mathematically-based languages.

Oftentimes researchers will use qualitative words, phrases and meanings and somehow translate them into numerical data that then can be processed and put through the statistical wringer. The human condition works with both qualitative and quantitative aspects within the brain. Focusing too much on one side of the equation will most likely cause problems and trouble understanding the total picture. Balance is key in this equation. Only when quality and quantity are melded together in a harmonic fashion, can we see the true advantage of modeling our understanding of the world on this type of research.