Messiness in medical research

With six years in academic medical research, I’ve come to learn that research is an absolute mess. It really is. The raw data that is given to you usually requires extensive processing and pruning, and then, after that, it’s up to you to pick out mathematical or statistical models to fit the data to tell an overall story. I’ve been sort of discouraged and have, to an extent, lost some faith in the rigor of the process. There’s a saying that medical advice changes very often, and I can definitely see why that is. There’s just something so incredibly flimsy about medical evidence. It’s a sort of forced evidence that is based on data acquired in a way that is messy and subject to error. I’m beginning to lose faith in the field of Western medicine. 

Traditional engineering is a little different, to be sure. With engineering, there is an exactness and rigor that needs to be achieved. They say that medicine is an art: well, engineering certainly is not. That’s what I like about it at the end of the day. I do possess a math brain when I think about it, even though the concept of a math brain has been debunked within the past few decades as a myth—I still sort of believe in it. In engineering and mathematics, there is a lack of messiness. It’s really about making things orderly and making sense of events and concepts that don’t inherently make sense. Engineering is about bringing order into the world.