Good vs. bad science: how to read and understand scientific studies

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Welcome to a special episode of The Drive. For this week's episode, we're going to re-broadcast AMA number 30 on how to read and understand scientific studies, which was originally released in December of 2021 While this was originally released as an AMA for subscribers only, due to how important of a topic this is, we've decided to re-release it and make it available for everyone today.
If you're a consumer of this podcast or any of our weekly emails, you know that I place a large emphasis on scientific literacy and how the media often gets this wrong and even well-intentioned scientists sometimes misrepresent or misunderstand their own results. And so this episode is our effort to try to help you with that. In this episode, we discuss 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, for example? 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 mean when a study is statistically significant? And is this the same as it being clinically significant? Why do some studies never get published? And what is my process for reading scientific papers? So without further delay, I hope you enjoy or re-enjoy this special episode on how to read and interpret scientific studies.
Hey, Bob, how are you, man? Looking pretty studious there in the library today.

**Bob Kaplan** (2:41)
Hey, Peter.
Thanks very much. Yeah, just getting some reading in before the podcast.

**Peter Attia** (2:47)
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 gonna 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?

**Bob Kaplan** (4:06)
I agree. I think it's a fun topic. We get so many of these questions that we end up, or at least I do, or to the website where we'll point readers to one of the parts of the studying studies.
But I think sometimes just talking about it and explaining it can help a lot. So I think this will be really useful as far as like a question and answer session rather than just reading a blog.