Question: What kinds of scientific evidence makes people inspired and excited?

David Nunan answered on 15 Nov 2015:

Hey,

Good question. So lets say there’s a medicine that doctors commonly give to their patients because they believe that it helps them with their medical condition. But then they learn that actually the medicine causes more harm than it does benefit and ends up killing more people than it helps save.

There is an example of this with a drug to help people with diabetes (a disease that means people need to inject insulin because their body doesn’t produce it properly). Millions of people were given it by their doctors. But then when people like me read the studies we noticed that the evidence showed the medicine actually cause heart problems. Thousands of people ended up with heart failure and 100’s died because of the drug. Eventually the drug was banned and the company who made it were fined 3 billion pounds (£3,000,000,000) for withholding the information about how it harmed people.

When we teach doctors to understand evidence like the example above, they get inspired because they realise that they can help their patients by being able to read studies that could help save peoples lives.