AMA #30: How to Read and Understand Scientific Studies

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey, everyone, welcome to a sneak peek Ask Me Anything, or AMA episode of the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. At the end of this short episode, I'll explain how you can access the AMA episodes in full, along with a ton of other membership benefits we've created. Or you can learn more now by going to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe. So without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the Ask Me Anything episode.
Welcome to another Ask Me Anything episode, AMA number 30 I'm once again joined by Bob Kaplan. In today's episode, we discuss all things around studying studies.
If you've listened to this podcast or read any of my weekly emails, you know that I place a large emphasis on being able to sift through the noise and find the signal when it comes to various studies and papers that are printed, both as the studies themselves and unfortunately a lot of the times when the media reports on them. So if you follow the news, you know there's no shortage of articles that either contradict each other, seem too good to be true, don't make any sense. It can be hard to understand this. So what do you do? Well, we've, as some of you may know, written a series on this called Studying Studies, but we've also tried to tackle some of the bigger things in this AMA. And we comb through a lot of the questions that many of you have been asking over the previous months and years that relate to this topic. I think we have enough of them here that we were able to put together a solid episode. This episode's a bit longer than normal.
We contemplated breaking it into two because it's so long, but I think our audience can handle this. And so at least now you have in one place the all singing, all dancing discussion of how to study studies. So in this discussion, we talk about a bunch of things. What are they? What is the process for a study to go from an idea to a design to execution? What are the different types of studies out there? And what do they mean? What are the strengths and limitations of each of them? How do clinical trials work specifically for drugs? What are the common pitfalls of observational studies that you should be looking for?
What questions should you be asking about a study to figure out how rigorous it was? What does it really mean when a study is statistically significant? Why do some studies never get published?
What is my process for reading scientific papers? So if you're a subscriber and you want to watch the video of this podcast, you can see it on the show notes page. I think that's valuable for this episode because I do refer to some tables though. This is still certainly amenable to audio only. If you're not a subscriber, you can watch the sneak peek of this on our YouTube page.
So without further delay, I hope you enjoy AMA number 30 Hey, Bob, how are you, man? Looking pretty studious there in the library today.

**Bob Kaplan** (2:37)
Hey, Peter.
Thanks very much. Yeah, just getting some reading in before the podcast.

**Peter Attia** (2:43)
This is going to be a pretty good one because, as you may recall about, I don't know, four or five months ago, maybe longer, I was on a podcast with Tim Ferriss, and I don't know how it came up, but I do remember somehow it came up that we had spent a lot of time writing this series, Studying Studies, and God, that's been four years ago, I think. But we didn't really have something more digestible for folks on how to make sense of the ever-changing landscape of scientific literature and how to kind of distinguish between the signal and the noise of the research news cycle. And I remember after that, Tim and I went out for dinner, and he kept pressing me on, well, what can I do to get better at this process?
Are there newsletters I should be subscribing to and things like that? And while I'm sure that there are, I didn't know what they were off the top of my head. And so I think what we've done here, when I say we, I mean you, what you have done here is aggregate all the questions that have come in over the past year, basically, that pertain to understanding the structure of science.
I looked through the questions last week, and I was pretty excited. I think it's going to be a sweet discussion, and I hope this serves as an amazing primer for people to really understand the process of scientific experiments and everything from how studies are published and obviously what some of the limitations are. So, anything else you want to add to that, Bob, before we jump in?