Epidemiology Research

Epidemiology is the major tool of the public health professional but the field is so big that there are specialists who focus exclusively on epidemiology research. The difference between the two is that the focus of epidemiology is much more narrow, it focuses on how disease spreads and pays little attention to things like promoting public health. Epidemiology research is mainly about statistics and most practitioners are not actually medical doctors. This can create a bit of an awkward situation when the researcher has to offer medical advice to a doctor. However most doctors now recognize the value of this type of research and take the advice offered them seriously.

The goal of epidemiology research is to study the patterns of disease. The goal is to determine risk factors for disease, they try to determine who is most likely to become ill in the hopes of preventing illness. Epidemiologists also attempt to determine the optimum medical solution to disease. In a lot of ways epidemiology research is similar to public health research except that the focus is almost entirely on how diseases spread. Generally the goal is to show that there is a relationship between exposure to something and illness. This allows researchers to determine who is most likely to become ill so that steps can be taken to help prevent the disease from occurring.

One of the other major areas of epidemiology research is that it helps to evaluate how successful a medical treatment has been. It does this in the same way that it determines the risk of illness by looking at large groups of the population and comparing the health of the people who have received treatment with those that haven't. It is hardly worth continuing with a treatment unless you know that it is working so this is an important part of epidemiology research.

One of the things that makes epidemiology research different from most other forms of medical research is that very few epidemiologists are doctors. The major research tool in epidemiology are statistics so most researchers are statisticians rather than medical doctors. This does make the way that the research is done different from how it is done in other areas of medicine since the researcher doesn't actually examine the patient, conclusions are drawn from the statistics. It also creates a bit of an awkward situation in which non-doctors are giving medical advice to doctors, this can occasionally cause problems.

In recent years there have been some concerns with epidemiology research, the biggest being that it is not very effective when it comes to subtle or secondary causes of illness. The research is usually pretty effective when it comes to finding the major cause of a disease but the results are less clear when there is more than one cause of a disease or when the cause is subtle.