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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...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @01:54PM (2 children)
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)
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
Unless it's a Hollywood star. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.