Problem
A consistent theme in this class was not to take epidemiological study results at face value. There's more to the story than a simple reported relative risk or p-value. In order to critically appraise the literature requires a skill set that the majority of the population do not possess. For me, even after reading hundreds of articles, I'm not sure I can fully interpret certain study results to the average citizen (have you ever tried to explain relative risk to someone?). Yet the public see data taken out of context from studies all the time, whether it's on a news story, social media post, advertisement, and so on. How can we as a field do better in educating and reporting our results to the public, while acknowledging the great uncertainty in many of our studies?