Take 5, everybody. Hey, Dr. Wilson, let's go ahead and record that intro. Hi, I'm just getting ready here. Pretty excited to get the new course up and going. So welcome to Your Facebook Friend Is Wrong. 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 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 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 hypothesis 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. So if that 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. They are dense, they're filled with jargon, they are like stereo instructions, and numbers and statistical test, and if you were to just look at them out of the blue without training, you would throw them away, 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 help you 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 just learn more about how science and medicine works. So who should take this course? Well, really, anyone who loves science should take this course, because this is of course, all about science and in my opinion, the most important sites 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, 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, journalists, people with medical conditions, or people who care about people with medical conditions. 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 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 then 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 2, we're going to teach scientific intuition. So scientific intuition doesn't come naturally, you have to work hard, 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 where it really counts, and we'll have fun, I promise. Now, I have to apologize to a wonderful teacher of mine, Dr. Qais Al Awqati, 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. Al Awqati, 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 that 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 up with some take-home points. So I'll end every lecture just like at the beginning, where we talk about goals. At the end, we're going to recapitulate what you've learned, 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. There's just a couple of things that 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'd imagined that each module should take you about a week to finish. So on average, 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 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 homepage 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 fleetingly, in passing, I show you a figure from or something like that, you are not required to read these. We'll tell you what required readings there might be. But if anytime you're watching a lecture and I mention a study and you get curious, "I want to look into that a little bit more." Just go back to the home screen, look under research 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 give feedback to one another, and we will actually put some structured question topics in the forums to get conversation going. 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 make you stimulate a little more 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 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. 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 hypie headlines that say that chocolate cures cancer, or that wearing a hat that's too tight can cause insanity. 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 1, if you think logically, you're in the right place, and if you don't, we'll show you how. Number 2, if you think medicine is cool, you're in the right place. You know what? If you don't think medicine is cool by the end of this, I promise you will. Of course, if you want to know if your Facebook friend is wrong when they post that, 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.
