Podcast Episode 25: Analytical Research

Analytical research. Why is it important? Let me start this podcast by telling you something about myself. Something that very few people know. Are you ready? Here goes. Between the age of 32 and 49, I moved house six times. Mainly in and around the London area. Properties that my wife and I bought and sold. A small flat. Family house. Another house. Back to a tiny flat. Then a bigger flat. bigger flat and finally a rented flat in Sussex while waiting to buy our dream house by the sea. Great, you might say. Good for you. Anyway, we were sitting in our final rented flat just shy of my 50th birthday and congratulating ourselves on having completed a round of property speculation which over 17 years had increased several times in value. That was until I checked on Google the current value of the first family house in West Ealing that we had bought 16 years previously and for the first time ever realised that had we simply stayed in that house for 15 years we would have made at least as much in property value. We would also have saved a batch of legal and moving fees, not to mention the usual stress, anxiety and wastefulness of constantly upsizing and downsizing. I won't even mention the mortgage payments. The evidence after just a little bit of analysis was there. We moved because we like moving, not because we were financially astute. In an excellent book called Thinking Fast and Slow, which I thoroughly recommend, the author Daniel Kahneman conducted a similar comparison on the performance of share portfolios that were on the one hand managed by respected investment gurus and on the other were selected at random from the top 200 companies in the stock market. The results over 25 years, roughly the same, not including the huge fees that were paid to the gurus of course. So So what's the point of all of this? Simply that we often think that we are performing analytically when we are not. Why do we do this? Because analysis is difficult and we don't like to do difficult things. We prefer to follow our pre-existing prejudices, which are sometimes what we wrongly call our instincts. Daniel Kahneman called this System 1 and System 2 thinking. System 1 thinking is the hard thinking, the learning, the research. Kids have to do it at school, it's tough and you have to make them do it, which is probably why they sleep so much. System two is the easy thinking, doing something that comes naturally like driving once you've learned how to do it. We adults don't like system one thinking either. We prefer to mess around doing things that we've done thousands of times before. It uses up less brain power and is simply less work. Now when you come to science or medicine, everybody will tell you that rigorous data analysis is extremely important. It enables new drugs to be assessed, new protocols to be established, the best hospital equipment to be bought. In terms of medical research it has long been thought that the best way to decide on the effectiveness of a new agent is the randomized clinical trial or RCT where an agent is compared to either placebo or a different agent in lots and lots of people. Even better is a meta-analysis where the results of several published RCTs are compared. But the problem is that RCTs cannot always be undertaken. Sometimes massive decisions have to be made without them, and these decisions risk being based on the same prejudices that drove my wife and I to randomly buy and sell properties around London for 17 years. The most current example of this is the public use of masks in protection against Covid-19, an incredibly contentious issue on both sides. During the height of the pandemic people tended to accept that masks were necessary and did their civic duty by wearing them in all the required places. Here in Australia they are still pretty much compulsory especially in the Melbourne area. There are of course a significant minority of people who regard masks as an infringement of civic liberty and will go to the extent of risking fines or imprisonment in order to protect that liberty by refusing to wear them. Personally I think that they are wrong to do so but when these people claim that there is no scientific proof that masks provide protection, they have a point. This is because no proper RCT has been undertaken with regard to the use of masks in protection against COVID-19, mainly because it would be unethical to do so. At the same time, there is some research that masks opponents like to wave around, which states that the droplets of virus that we breathe in and breathe out are far smaller than the gaps, allowing them to enter in the typical mask material that the public use. Randomized clinical trials have been run on the effectiveness of masks against COVID-2 SARS in Beijing and against some types of influenza and both have demonstrated that they have provided very good protection. You might want to infer from this that masks are probably a good idea during certain phases of the global pandemic. The only peer-reviewed paper on the effectiveness of masks against COVID-19 that compares populations seems to suggest that masks have worked against the pandemic because of the social distancing protocols that exist when they are adopted. Wound care is a very difficult area to conduct fully recognised analytical research. Aside from a landmark study on compression, most other studies are relatively small with too much intrinsic bias. That doesn't prevent the fact that there are lots of them and they should be looked at. It's just that you need to be very careful to study the parameters within which the studies have been conducted. Talking of studies in wound care, did you know that there is a very large relational database on the Lead Club network? It's taken a very long time to set up, but you can access the whole of the paper written last year about it in the International Wound Journal with initial findings through ResearchGate. Just google a relational database within the Lead Club network. It analyses records of more than 17,000 members who attended the leg club between 2014 and 2019. Over 266,000 member leg assessments have been recorded. The initial findings are pretty interesting, but see for yourself. If you are a supporter of the leg club model, or involved in any way, I recommend it as a way of analysing its effectiveness. It's what we should all remember to do from time to time. So when you have an important decision to make, as the writer of Thinking Fast and Slow suggested, Analyse the pros and cons of each option. Write them down, list out the benefits and drawbacks, score them out of 10 or 20, and make a decision based on the higher score. It's a bit more work than you might like to do, but it may save you time and trouble in the long run. Unless you're buying a dress or a tie, then go for the pink one, because I like pink. Time for me to look up some estate agents. I haven't moved for quite a while.