Every day we hear details of a new study telling us important new information about health. But sometimes you have to wonder what the researchers were thinking, because their findings are, to state the obvious, really obvious.
For example, a Kaiser Family Foundation study found children shouldn’t do their homework with the television on, because it’s too distracting. No, you don’t say!!
What about the British study in September’s Emergency Medicine Journal that found the greater the distance a person traveled in an ambulance the more likely they were to die before they got to the hospital. What a shocker!
And of course if you do get to the ER alive, another study shows that waiting more than 2 hours to get help apparently reduces your level of satisfaction. Why? Who wouldn’t want to hang out in their local ER for extended periods? You can compare lesions or fractures with the folks around you, even take bets on who gets seen next.
There is plenty of talent at the University of Duh! One study in the Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine found that long-term exposure to air pollution is bad for kids’ lungs and makes it hard to breathe. Don’t worry, those crazy researchers weren’t going out on a limb with those findings. Some other scientists in Southern California – and they know bad air when they see it – found the same thing a few years earlier. See, it’s good to have back up.
Want a few more research gems?
- A study found that kids who come from poor or low income backgrounds and have no medical insurance see doctors less than kids who are from wealthy backgrounds and have insurance.
- Researchers at Boston University found that break dancing can lead to back injury
- Ohio State University researchers found that if people stop smoking they can save money.
- It took researchers from both UCLA and University of Washington to find out that it is easier to recognize someone when they are close up, than when they are far away.
Now maybe there is a benefit to doing some of these studies. Sometimes you have to prove there is a problem before you can look for a solution. But really do we need a team from Harvard Medical School to tell us that if a doctor makes an error such as, say, amputating the wrong leg, that it makes patients unhappy and they are more inclined to file a lawsuit.
So why do researchers do studies like this? Well, one reason is because they can, for the simple reason that they can get funding to do them. Secondly many researchers academic careers depend on doing this kind of work. They have to publish to get a job, hold a job, and get a promotion. And then there are all those academic journals that need something to put in there and keep the drug ads from bumping into each other.
But just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should do it. Maybe that money could be better spent finding solutions to problems rather than just telling us what we already know. For instance, how do you solve the problem of taking care of poor kids with no medical insurance, instead of just telling me they can’t see a doctor as often a rich kid.
Still, there is some comfort knowing the obvious. Now at least parents can use the fact that British researchers found that buying noisy Christmas toys can damage a child’s hearing to make more sensible purchases. Like ear plugs.
