Video summary
Bu kursun temel amacı, tıbbi araştırmaların karmaşık dilini ve istatistiksel jargonunu anlaşılır bir hale getirerek katılımcılara bu alandaki anahtar kavramları öğretmektir. Dr. Perry Wilson, nefrolog ve klinik araştırmacı olarak, hastanelerin yoğun raporlarını okumayı öğrenen herkesin sağlık bilgilerini doğrudan kaynağından takip etmesi gerektiğini vurgular. Kurs, katılımcılara sadece bilimsel makaleleri anlamayı değil, aynı zamanda bu çalışmaların sonuçlarının kendi sağlıkları veya sevdikleri kişiler için ne kadar geçerli olduğunu değerlendirebilme yetkinliğini kazandırmayı hedefler. Böylece öğrenciler, sosyal medyada veya gazetelerde yayılan abartılı sağlık iddialarını eleştirel bir gözle inceleyebilir ve bilimsel verilerin arkasındaki gerçekleri ayırt edebilirler.
Kurs içeriği, katılımcılara herhangi bir matematiksel formül ezberletmeden istatistiksel testlerin mantığını kavratmaya odaklanır; çünkü asıl hedef, sayıları hesaplamak değil, bu sayıların ne anlama geldiğini yorumlayabilme becerisini geliştirmektir. Eğitim sürecinde gerçek dünyadaki örnekler ve hakemli dergilerde yayınlanmış bilimsel çalışmalar kullanılarak teorik bilgiler pratikte nasıl uygulandığı gösterilecektir. Ayrıca, katılımcılara kendi önyargılarını fark etmeleri ve araştırmaların tasarımındaki potansiyel hataları tespit edebilecekleri bir "bilimsel sezgi" kazandırılacaktır. Bu yaklaşım sayesinde öğrenciler, binlerce yıllık tıbbi çalışma arasından gerçekten önemli olanları ayırabilir ve günlük hayatta karşılaştıkları sağlık haberlerini daha bilinçli tüketebilirler.
Kurs yapısı, her dersin başında hedeflerin belirlenmesi, ardından gerçek bir vaka veya anekdot üzerinden konunun tanıtılması ve sonunda özet alınması şeklinde düzenlenmiştir. Coursera platformu üzerindeki esneklik sayesinde katılımcılar kendi hızlarında ilerleyebilirler ve istedikleri zaman ilgili araştırmaların tam metinlerini inceleyebilirler. Sınıf forumları aracılığıyla hem eğitmenler hem de yardımcı öğretim üyeleri ile etkileşime girerek sorularını sorabilir ve tartışmalara katkıda bulunabilirler. Bu interaktif ortam, katılımcıların konuyu derinlemesine kavramalarına ve toplulukla birlikte düşünme becerilerini geliştirmelerine olanak tanır.
Kursu tamamlayan bireylerin sahip olacağı en büyük güç, tıbbi araştırmaları okuyup anlamayıp, bunların klinik uygulamaları değiştiren nitelikte olup olmadığını veya sadece küçük bir bilgi eklemesi yapıp yapmadığını belirleyebilme yeteneğidir. Bu beceri, katılımcıları sadece sağlık alanında değil, genel olarak mantık ve nedensellik üzerine düşünmeyi öğrenerek daha eleştirel düşünen bireyler haline getirecektir. Böylece insanlar, "şeker kanseri iyileştirir" veya "sıkı şapka delilik yapar" gibi abartılı başlıklara karşı direnç kazanacak ve her iddia için kanıt aramayı alışkanlık haline getireceklerdir. Dr. Wilson, bu yolculuğun hem eğlenceli hem de öğretici olacağını belirterek katılımcılara başarılar diler.
Read the full video transcript
[Applause]
take five everybody
hey dr wilson let's go ahead and record
that intro
oh hi we're just getting ready here
pretty excited got the new course uh up
and going
um so welcome to your facebook friend is
wrong uh it's going to be really
exciting and i'm excited to walk you
through this whole course
but today i'm just giving you the
introduction just a little bit of a hint
of what you're getting if you want to
sign up for this
so our goals here are to describe what
this course is all about and
and decide who should take it who it's
for
we'll tell you how it works from a nuts
and bolts perspective and
we will tell you about the superpower
you'll have when you finish
going through all of this course but
before we get started i'll tell you
a little bit about me my name is f perry
wilson i'm a physician i'm a
nephrologist which is a kidney doctor
but i'm also a clinical researcher so i
conduct medical research studies like
randomized trials
and things like that and i'm sort of a
methods guy
so i have learned a lot about how
research is done and the appropriate
ways it should be done and i'm trying to
convey that knowledge
to you i love a lot of things in the
world
i love science i love medicine
i love hypotheses and experiments
and i really love being wrong i love
when i think
something works one way and i find out
with good data that it works another way
so if that's the kind of person you are
too you'll have a great time
i hate hype i hate
articles that say that a single thing
can cure cancer
i hate when people try to take advantage
of sick people
and especially when they sell things
that don't work
and so if that kind of thing bothers you
too this might be a good course
for you so why we are here why we put
this whole course
together was because medical research
studies
are really hard to read
right they are dense they're filled with
jargon they're like stereo instructions
and numbers and statistical tests
and if you were to just look at them out
of the blue
without training you would throw them
away it wouldn't make any sense
and that leaves you to understand these
medical research
studies through the filter of other
mediums whether it's journalists or
social media like twitter
or people posting about things on
facebook but if you really want to know
what's going on you have to go to the
primary source
you have to be able to read these things
so i'm going to help you sort of climb
the ivy tower
translate all this jargon into something
you can really understand and give you
a set of tools so that you can read
these studies to take care of yourself
to take care of a loved one or to
learn just learn more about how science
and medicine
works so who should take this course
well really
anyone who loves science should take the
take this course because this is of
course
all about science and in my opinion the
most important science there is
which is the science of health and how
to keep people living
longer happier healthier lives
but if you want a little bit more
specifics um who we're geared towards
here
really anyone who wants to be able to
speak
with some facility about these types of
studies so students
um journalists people with medical
conditions or people who
care about people with medical
conditions um people who are just
into science or statistics or
epidemiology and want to learn a bit
more or people who are terrified of
science and statistics
and epidemiology and if we can give them
a little bit of knowledge they'll be
slightly less
terrified so i'm going to make some
promises to you at this point
this very first introductory part of
this course
that we will hold to first of all there
will be no math
except a little bit of math but there
we're not going to be integrating things
my goal is not to teach you how to do
statistical tests my goal is to teach
you how to understand the results of
statistical tests
and scientific papers number two we're
going to teach
scientific intuition so scientific
intuition
doesn't come naturally you have to work
at it you have to learn
where your own biases are and where the
biases are in the way studies are
constructed so that you can start to
sniff out
which studies sound like they should
really be something you pay attention to
and what you shouldn't spend much time
on whenever
we talk about something we're going to
use real world examples to
demonstrate key principles and we'll
actually pull in
actual studies real studies in the
peer-reviewed literature
so that we can apply the principles
we've learned um
where it really counts and we'll have
fun
i promise now i have to apologize to a
wonderful teacher of mine dr kaisal
kwadi who in his introductory lecture to
a course said
if you are having fun in this course you
aren't working hard enough
so i'm sorry dr alicati but in this
course
if you're having fun you're doing it
just right so
each lecture is going to be structured
fairly similarly we'll start with a set
of goals what i want you to learn
by the end of the lecture we'll then
usually transition
into an anecdote or something to give
you a little bit of intuition about
where the lecture
is going we'll always talk about those
real world examples so real world
studies that have happened
and that you can apply what you learned
in that lecture to the study
and then we'll finish out with some
take-home points so i'll end every
structure
every lecture just like at the beginning
where we talk about goals
at the end we're going to sort of
recapitulate what you've learned and the
major things you want to get out
of that lecture when it's over and of
course there will be
evaluations because this is a course and
course
have evaluations so this course
many of you are experiencing this on
coursera and
if you've taken a coursera course before
you're pretty familiar with how it works
but for those of you who haven't used
coursera before
welcome we're very glad you're here
and there's just a couple of things that
um you need to know
by and large this works just like any
other course that you would take
sitting in a lecture hall there are
going to be lectures there's going to be
readings
there's going to be evaluations that you
take
and you'll go through the course there's
about
six modules and we imagine that each
module
should take you about a week to finish
so
on average you can take around imagine
you'll take about six weeks to get all
the way
through this course doing the
assignments that we ask of you now
if uh you need more time that's the
great thing about coursera you can take
it you're on your own schedule here
and if everything's just really clicking
and making sense to you and you want to
go go go
you can absolutely do that too so a
little bit different than the lectures
you might remember
now a couple of special things that are
different than other coursera courses
here if you look at the home page on the
left hand side
you're going to see a tab that says
research studies now in that tab
is every single research study that i
discuss
during this entire course even the ones
i only mentioned sort of
fleetingly in passing i show you a
figure from or something like that
you are not required to read these will
tell you what required readings there
might be
but if any time you're watching a
lecture and i mention a study and you
kind of get curious oh i want to look
into that a little bit more
just go back to the home screen look
under reach search studies and you can
bring up the pdf of that entire study
you can read it
and look in depth and get a sense of
what's going on so please feel free to
do that
the other thing we have as part of this
course is forums
now forums you're probably experienced
with but these are
online places where you can post
questions and answers
people in the class can can give
feedback to one another
and we will actually put some structured
question topics
in the forums to kind of get
conversation going and i'll be in the
forums
and some of the teaching assistants will
be in the forums to interact with all of
you
and to answer your questions and to hope
to to make you stimulate
a little more um discussion and
thoughtfulness about the course so i
really hope to see you there
in the forums in the end
i told you you're going to have a
superpower that very few people have
and that's true in the end you'll be
able to read a medical study
and understand it more importantly
you'll be able to figure out
how important it is is this a study
that is ground-shakingly important or is
this
one of the thousands and thousands of
medical studies that come out every year
that add a little bit to knowledge but
don't generally change
how we practice medicine you'll also
know whether the study
applies to you or people you care about
or not
you might be surprised how often a
finding really doesn't apply
to you when you dig into the study a
little bit
you'll be able to think more critically
in general i hope not just about medical
studies but as you go through this
course and you learn
ways to think about logic and causality
you may bring that to the other parts of
your life and become a more
critical thinker and someone who
actually demands evidence when people
make
statements of them and finally you'll be
a better consumer of medical information
as you are
scrolling through your newspaper or your
facebook feed
or twitter and you see those hypey
headlines
that say that you know chocolate cures
cancer or that wearing a hat that's too
tight can cause
insanity okay i haven't seen that last
one but anything like that you will know
that there's a way to look and find the
truth
get to the data and understand what's
going on
welcome to our first set of take-home
points this is how we end
every lecture number one if you think
logically
you're in the right place and if you
don't we'll show you how number two
if you think medicine is cool you're in
the right place and you know what if you
don't think medicine is cool by the end
of this
i promise you will and of course if you
want to know if your facebook friend is
wrong
when they post that um you're definitely
in the right place so i hope you'll
stick with us i hope you'll join us on
this journey
you're going to learn a lot it's going
to be a lot of fun and
i'll see you at the other side