Health Is More Complicated Than Correlations

Ice cream, spiders, long words, and how to tell when a news story mistakes cause and effect

It’s all fun and games until someone asks him to spell myxomatosis.

There’s a wonderful ride that we go on every few months. It’s astonishingly predictable and a brilliant short story about how we misunderstand scientific research.

To understand this story, you must understand the first basic rule of science. I’m not talking about one of Newton’s laws or Galileo’s formulae. I’m not even talking about the principles of basic research.

The first basic rule of science is this: Most research progress is achieved through tiny steps. Research is slow and ponderous.

But most of all, it’s pretty boring.

Pictured: research.

This is something that, fundamentally, we don’t want to be true. How can research be boring when it has filled our lives with wonderful gadgets and medical science that keeps us all ticking? Research has made our lives infinitely more interesting.

Research moves forward in tiny steps. There’s no giant leap forward; instead, it’s a tentative crawl with thousands of missteps. For every “breakthrough”…