More on Epidemiology and the Public's Health

A recent article in the New York Times Magazine profiles the case of hormone replacement therapy as an example of the seemingly endless yo-yo cycle of medical research findings, and discusses whether or not we know what really makes us healthy. It's treatment of epidemiology is informed if a little focused on the negative.

clipped from www.nytimes.com While the tools of epidemiology — comparisons of populations with and without a disease — have proved effective over the centuries in establishing that a disease like cholera is caused by contaminated water, as the British physician John Snow demonstrated in the 1850s, it’s a much more complicated endeavor when those same tools are employed to elucidate the more subtle causes of chronic disease.