RE: Epidemiology

["Dov Brickner" <brickner@zahav.net.il>]

hi radsafers

>

>

>  I was convinced that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer.

> Now, I am not so sure.



Wonderful. If you are not sure that smoking one cigarette (per lifetime?

per yaer? maybe for month?) cause cancer you earned the time you wasted

reading all this stuff in radsafe. A basic course in epidemiology or

biostatistics would be more cost effective perhaps but sure not as fun.



> I wonder if the studies on the relationship between smoking

> and lung cancer sufficiently accounted for all possible variables such

> as exposure to radon. Perhaps there are unknown confounders

> out there that could have considerably biased the outcome

> of these studies. I have seen no proof that all possible unknown

>  confounding agents were sufficiently considered.

> You can learn a lot on radsafe.

>



Sure , there are many confounders that are unknown and much more

confounders that it is not feasible to consider. Epidemiology is a bad

surrogate to molecular biology to solve questions like what cause cancer .

Yet it is a neccesary step in the road leading to understanding the disease

process. So maybe we can take epidemiology in propoetion and don't over or

underestimate the significant of every paper on rad- epi?



Dov  (Dubi)Brickner   MD

Beer Sheva    ISRAEL



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