Having last year published "Up from Clinical Epidemiology & EBM" and
also "Epidemiological Research: Terms and Concepts," Miettinen now -
this time with collaboration from his junior colleague I. Karp - brings
out this further introduction into epidemiological research; and he is
now working on an introduction into clinical research, for publication
next year. It evidently is Miettinen's felt time to crystallize the
basic understandings he has come to as the culmination of a half-century
of concentrated effort to advance the theory of epidemiological and
'meta-epidemiological clinical' research.
In accord with its title, this book focuses on research to develop the
knowledge-base for preventive medicine, which mainly is knowledge about
the causal origin -etilogy, etiogenesis - of illness. It first
illustrates how wanting this knowledge still is, despite much research;
and it then aims to guide the reader to more productive etiogenetic
research.
This book places much emphasis on the need to assure relevance by
principles-guided objects design for the studies, which now remains
conspicuously absent from epidemiologists' concerns. And as for methods
design, this book exposes the fallacies in the still-common 'cohort' and
'case-control' studies, defines the essentials of all etiogenetic
studies, and then addresses the true options for design in this
framework of shared essentials.
A good deal of attention is also given to the still commonly-held, very
major, twin fallacies that screening for an illness is a preventive
intervention, to be studied by randomized trials, and that research on
it can imply rational guidelines or recommendations regarding decisions
about the screening.
While Miettinen already is regarded as 'the father of modern
epidemiology, ' he now appears to have become the father also of
post-modern epidemiology, where 'epidemiology' still means
epidemiological research.
