Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by on Wednesday April 19 2017, @11:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the psychosomatics-unite dept.

For more than two thousand years people have believed that joint pain could be triggered by bad weather, but the link has never been proven.

But now, by harnessing the power of thousands of volunteers, doctors hope to unravel the mystery. And the new technique could offer countless solutions to a whole host of ailments.

[...] Each day she enters information about how she feels into an app on her phone, the phone's GPS pinpoints her location, pulls the latest weather information from the internet, and fires a package of data to a team of researchers.

On its own Becky's data is of limited interest, but she isn't acting alone. More than 13,000 volunteers have signed up for the same study, sending vast quantities of information into a database - more than four million data points so far.

The app, called "Cloudy with a Chance of Pain" is part of a research project being run by Will Dixon. He is a consultant rheumatologist at Salford Royal Hospital and has spent years researching joint pain.

My rheumatism is triggered when the wife asks me to carry heavy, heavy things up to our 3rd-floor walk-up...


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday April 19 2017, @11:32AM (8 children)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Wednesday April 19 2017, @11:32AM (#496244)

    How can you blind the data on a test like this? Does this have any research purpose or is it an outreach project?

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by engblom on Wednesday April 19 2017, @11:51AM

    by engblom (556) on Wednesday April 19 2017, @11:51AM (#496250)

    Very simple: Normally the pain begins right before weather change. You would just need an app to mark that you feel pain and then check from the weather stations what the weather actually became.

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 19 2017, @12:16PM (6 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday April 19 2017, @12:16PM (#496258)

    Contrary to some segments of academia's religiously held beliefs, there is value in non blinded, non placebo controlled studies. With a massive sample size like this, you can establish reliable rates of occurrence, and if there is sufficient repeatability in a given population you can then study interventions and their efficacy.

    If a placebo can reduce pain for 80% of the population 80% of the time with low cost and minimal side effects, is it any less valuable than a bio-engineered drug that works for fewer people less often at higher cost with more severe side effects?

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @12:38PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @12:38PM (#496261)

      If a placebo can reduce pain for 80% of the population 80% of the time with low cost and minimal side effects, is it any less valuable than a bio-engineered drug that works for fewer people less often at higher cost with more severe side effects?

      <sarcasm>Obviously. Ask the pharmacy-shareholder of your trust, and he will explain the value of engineered and patented drugs to capitalism, roi [for the parmacy industry] and job-market</sarcasm>

    • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday April 19 2017, @01:48PM (1 child)

      by PiMuNu (3823) on Wednesday April 19 2017, @01:48PM (#496292)

      > Contrary to some segments of academia's religiously held beliefs

      Woah, that is a bit of a snarky response!

      > If a placebo can reduce pain for 80% of the population 80% of the time with low cost and minimal side effects

      Fair enough. I guess a phrase from TFS like "but the link has never been proven" made me think that there was some aim to demonstrate a mechanism, but maybe "link" just means show a correlation/placebo-ish thing, like what you say.

      • (Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday April 19 2017, @02:38PM

        by sjames (2882) on Wednesday April 19 2017, @02:38PM (#496315) Journal

        Showing a link is step one. If there is no link, then none of the more exacting (and expensive) followup is necessary or useful.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @01:54PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @01:54PM (#496295)

      This shoudn't be surprising. The most advanced science is astromomy where there are no RCTs at all. The idea of RCTs as a "gold standard" is something come up with by statisticians and parroted by people who "hate math" because it seemed to sophisticate their papers. No scientist was in the loop.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @12:35AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @12:35AM (#496619)

        That's not relevant. Double blind tests are used when dealing with subjective data being collected from humans and animals. Cases where the person's experience might be biased by the belief about whether or not they've received a real treatment and the interpretation of the responses by researchers.

        That doesn't really apply to most areas of science as the criteria tend to not be that subjective. The mass of a star isn't subject to whether or not you think that it should be less fat.

        • (Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 20 2017, @09:09AM

          by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday April 20 2017, @09:09AM (#496765) Journal

          The mass of a star isn't subject to whether or not you think that it should be less fat.

          Unless it's a Hollywood star. :-)

          --
          The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.