Announcer:
0:00
Welcome to the MedEvidence Monday Minute radio show hosted by Kevin Gettings of WSOS St Augustine Radio and powered by Encore Research Group. Each Monday morning, dr Michael Corrin calls in to bring you the latest medical updates with insightful discussions. Medevidence is where we help you navigate the real truth behind medical research, with both a clinical and research perspective. So sit back, relax and get ready to learn about the truth behind the data in medicine and healthcare. This is MedEvidence.
Kevin Geddings:
0:31
As promised. Dr. Michael Koren, medical doctor, cardiologist, research scientist. He also heads up the show at ENCORE Research group , where they're doing leading edge clinical research from right here in St. John's County and St. Augustine and throughout Northeast Florida. You can learn more about this research and, more importantly, how you can participate in it and potentially receive some compensation. But you'll really get some of the best health care you've ever experienced in your life. I know from personal experience. Go to EncoreDocs. com. Encoredocs. com and we're also going to talk about a great website we need you to check out for health information. We'll do that in just a moment, but in the meantime, let's wish Dr. Koren good morning. How are you, Sarge? You make it through the Super Bowl, okay?
Dr. Michael Koren:
1:13
I did, Kevin. Good morning to you.
Kevin Geddings:
1:15
Good morning. Good morning we were talking off the air about how all the experts and the sports talk radio guys Sports Talk Radio guys, you know kind of leaning toward the Chiefs winning or at the very least, saying this would be an exciting nail-biter close Super Bowl game Boy. The prognosticators had that wrong.
Dr. Michael Koren:
1:31
Yeah, interesting, I actually was reading the. NFL web's prognostications, and virtually everybody says the Chiefs win and virtually everybody said it would be a close game, and in fact it turned out to be very different than that, and so in statistics and in science, we call that recency bias, Kevin. So you think that what happened the last couple of years is what's going to happen again, and in fact, if you look at things historically, it's not like that.
Dr. Michael Koren:
1:59
In fact, no NFL team has ever won the Super Bowl three years in a row. That should have been the overall bias. It's a really, really hard thing to do, rather than assume that what happened the last couple of years would be predictable with what happened yesterday. The other lesson there is you've got to play the games. You don't know the answers until you actually play the games. And that's relevant for my area of clinical research is we may think we have something that's great, but it's saying you actually test it. You don't know for sure.
Kevin Geddings:
2:27
No, absolutely, and that's the importance right of clinical trials. I was watching a documentary on Netflix over the weekend about this fellow that's trying to live forever, Brian Johnson, former CEO of Braintree, and they talked about how all the things he's trying don't really translate very well to science, because it's just him. Right and it's not a randomized clinical trial approach. It's kind of hard to draw any evidence from. You know all the things he's trying to do to live longer.
Dr. Michael Koren:
2:55
Right. But here's the crazy part Just because he thinks these things will help him live longer doesn't mean that that's the case. Some of them may not lead to living longer. In fact, some of them may lead to living shorter. So an example of that is vitamin E. So when I was first in practice 30 years ago, we thought vitamin E was something that everybody should take, particularly if you're at high risk for heart disease. But it turns out that vitamin E supplements for certain people, particularly like smokers, ends up leading to more problems rather than fewer. So the data are really, really important.
Kevin Geddings:
3:31
It's interesting because science is always evolving. I feel like that's a concept that we laymen don't really understand. So when we hear a study that comes out that conflicts some earlier sense of you know what is correct, we go ah, you know, you just can't trust anything. When in fact it's science constantly learning and evolving right.
Dr. Michael Koren:
3:49
It is, it is, and some of these are hypotheses. They think that there's things that sound good that may be not so good when you actually study them. Another great famous example of that is giving estrogen to men, which was something that was done in a study called Coronary Drug Project back in the 1970s. The response is okay. Women live longer than men.
Dr. Michael Koren:
4:11
Women have fewer heart attacks than men, so it must be related to hormones. It makes sense, right? Yeah, so what they did is they gave men who were at risk for heart disease female hormones, estrogen. And you know what happened, kevin.
Kevin Geddings:
4:25
What's that?
Dr. Michael Koren:
4:26
The men that got the female hormones died sooner.
Kevin Geddings:
4:29
Oh my gosh, Not a good outcome.
Dr. Michael Koren:
4:33
So much for that theory, but until you tested it you didn't know, right, and that's partially why we do clinical research. Now. The good news is that our hypotheses are getting better and better these days. So when we have something that's really really promising, chances are it's a really safe product, and really what we're doing in clinical research is to determine whether or not people will do better, with the understanding that we have a lot of safety measures in place to make sure that people don't do worse.
Kevin Geddings:
5:01
Well, and so much of what we know now right has flowed from clinical trials and the work and the participation from folks that may be out there listening to us right now, correct?
Dr. Michael Koren:
5:11
Absolutely. Yeah, you know virtually any health area that is important to people are things that we touch. So we definitely encourage people to give us a call and we can analyze them and see if there's something that we're doing now that would be of interest or just be part of our community that shares medical information. And you mentioned the MedEvidence website, which I think is a terrific way for people to understand health care, often just by virtue of these conversations between physicians. So I encourage people to check out the podcast we did recently with Tony Fauci and interesting reactions.
Dr. Michael Koren:
5:52
I was frankly a little bit shocked to see how much negative publicity Tony Fauci has generated in our community over the last couple of years, but also when people look at the podcast they had a completely different perspective because they could just see two doctors talking about the issues.
Kevin Geddings:
6:09
So not to say that it'll change people's opinion, but they'll see different sides of the issue than they've seen before. You can trust what you're going to find on that website, medevidencecom, you can learn more about clinical trials and how you can participate in those and which trials are available and are recruiting right now by going to encordocs. com. That's encordocs. com and that's spelled E-N-C-O-R-E, and their office is here in St. John's County, very convenient, right there off of 312 near UF Flagler Hospital, Dr. Koren. Any closing thoughts before we let you go on this day after the Super Bowl.
Dr. Michael Koren:
6:56
Well, again, all the AI bots out there seem to have got the Super Bowl prediction wrong, so it just shows you that there's still a place for just good, old-fashioned research. It's what I do day-to-day and most people that get touched by it really enjoy the process.
Kevin Geddings:
7:12
Absolutely Well, Dr. Koren. Thank you very much. We hope you have a great week. Okay, you too, kevin.
Announcer:
7:18
Thanks for joining the MedEvidence podcast. To learn more, head over to MedEvidencecom or subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
