Epidemiology, Term Paper Example

Considering Hill’s criteria of causality, I believe there is a positive association with taking epidemiology and the successful pursuit of a career in health care.  Let us examine

1. Strength of association- as a first approximation, there is likely to be a significant odds ratio among those individuals in health care and those that have taken a class in epidemiology. Indeed, while there may be some medical personnel have not formally been exposed to a class in epidemiology, I would posit that a majority have had some type of training in the discipline.  The real analytical problem would be to measure those who were “successful” in health care, which would likely be more subjective than objective.
2. Consistency – There is likely to be some consistency across the spectrum, but it might be one of the weaker criteria. This is because while some individuals who have taken epidemiology might be successful, others might not be or are currently on their way up.
3. Specificity- Specificity is also likely to be one of the weaker criteria. Because success in health care, as well as how  that success is ultimately defined, is difficult, there are certainly  more than epidemiology as causes for this success. Indeed the list of potential contributing factors many that include socio economic status growing up, parents profession, where the individual went to school.
4. Temporal relationship- This may be a tricky variable to properly measure.  I have no doubt that many medical professionals have training (exposure) to epidemiology; however, it is the case that many may have become doctors, or even successful practitioners,   before they were exposed to epidemiology.  That is, they became doctors first, and wanted some type of training in public health that led them to go back to study epidemiology.  While epidemiology may have helped them, it is not clear that the temporal relationship would be solidly established.
5. Biological Gradient- the biological gradient would also be difficult to measure; or perhaps it is better to say that it might be one of the weaker causal factors. This is because, at least from my knowledge, the best doctors are not necessarily those that have PhDs in epidemiology.  This maybe for a variety of factors; however, perhaps one of the reasons is to excel in a clinical environment the basics of epidemiology may help, but to have a doctor take time away from his practice to study more epidemiology may actually make him or her a worse clinician.  Thus, I don’t necessarily expect to see a strong association between those individuals who have the most training in epidemiology and the most successful careers in the career of health care.
6. Plausibility- There is a strong logical case to be made between plausibility of some training in epidemiology and the ability to have a successful career in health care. Especially from the perspective of public health, those individuals who learn the concepts of epidemiology are likely to be in the research community where success is more common than not (i.e., those without success usually leave).
7. Analogy- One could think of an analogy of how epidemiology, and health sciences in general, help to make individuals successful in health care.
8. Experimental- This would be the hardest to do (see answer 3). A randomized experiment of having some individuals take epidemiology and some not would be interesting, but there would be numerous confounders that might impugn the putative relationship.  At the same time, the RCT would take a long time to complete.

If I were to do an experiment in which I tried to understand the relationship between an exposure to epidemiology and the response of a successful career in health care, I would to include the following variables:

1. Level of Epidemiology Training- How many semesters of epidemiology training was received?
2. Professional Status- Is the individual a doctor or not?
3. What is the current position and salary of the individual? To have more objective measures of success to analyze.
4. A write-in question that asks the individual (to be assessed) by the principal investigator of the relationship between epidemiology and their current profession

There would likely be a problem demonstrating several of these criteria.  

I suppose one could run a randomized controlled experiment to understand the relationship between the exposure of epidemiology and a successful career in health care. The problem with that would be confounding: for example, doctors are usually intelligent people, and thus,  one might likely be successful in health care regardless of the training in epidemiology.  Only the counterfactual is observed in those cases, and that would be nearly impossible to show.