Behavioral Ecology Blog

Per their website:

ScienceDaily is one of the Internet’s leading online magazines and Web portals devoted to science, technology, and medicine. The free, advertising-supported service brings you breaking news about the latest discoveries and hottest research projects in everything from astrophysics to zoology. For three years in a row, ScienceDaily has been chosen by the editors of Popular Science magazine as one of the “Top 50 Web Sites.” (For more about our awards, please click here.)

I would imagine that their site gets millions of hits per day- and this doesn’t count bloggers like me that post links to stories and other info.. There is just one problem with all this: THEY CANT SEEM TO UNDERSTAND ONE OF THE MOST BASIC SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPALS- THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CAUSATION AND CORRELATION.

Case in point- This story: Emotions Can Affect Recovery From Hip Surgery

Orthopaedic surgeons typically use two tests to determine if a patient has recovered from hip surgery: one is a clinical measure of hip function given by the doctor, and the second is a questionnaire patients answer that considers a wide variety of factors in determining the overall success of the surgical procedure.

“We started out simply looking to see if the results of the two tests were correlated; the one doctors give has been used for decades to evaluate hip function, and the other that the patient answers is much newer,” says Berton Moed, M.D., chair of the department of orthopaedic surgery at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. “What we found was surprising - the clinical test found good-to-excellent results, while the self-test taken by the same patients showed significantly worse recovery.”

The disparity, says Moed, can be explained by a section of questions on the self-test not addressed by the clinical test: those dealing with emotional well-being. A patient’s emotional status was the second-most important factor in determining how well he or she thought recovery was going.

I have no problem with the research itself- although it certainly can be filed under the “No Shit Sherlock” category.

Einstien, Brilliant- you mean people’s sense of well being is reduced in the setting of clinical depression?? 21st century research there….wow…

Ok, anyway- the authors clearly state that they were looking for correlation- and don’t imply ever in the paper that they believe that emotions CAUSE improved outcomes- exactly opposite of what ScienceDaily implies with the use of the word AFFECT in their title..

To the editors of ScienceDaily: Please, get your act together… You are responsable for the “science edication” of millions of people- act accordingly..

See other examples: Here, here.