Month: March 2018

My future career is going to be working in the pharmaceutical so I find this blog post very relevant to my future life. I hope to someday do research on diseases and come up with drugs and treatment options for patients diagnosed with those diseases. A particular disease I have always found extremely interesting has been Alzheimers. I don’t personally know anyone suffering from this disease, but from what I do know I would not want anyone I know to develop it. It is a sad thing to watch happen to a loved one, and I think would be an amazing topic to do research on.

I would love to fund a research team to focus on how our micro biome effects aspects of Alzheimer’s disease, and hopefully someday I will be working on the research myself.

Part 1:

Some infectious diseases that come to my mind are diabetes, IBS, IBD, obesity, mental illness, cancer, arthritis, parkinsons, stroke, heart disease, and allergies.

Part 2:

I have some similar overlapping diseases from my initial post the first week.  However, I have a much better understanding about what a non-infectious disease is and had a easier time of thinking of examples. An important topic that I am going to take away from this class is that our micro biome has an impact on our mental health. I read one of my peers final essays and they talked about this topic and I found it very important and relevant to my stressful life.

• Can experiments detect differences that matter?
  • It is important to consider this question because an article is only relevant to the reader if it is something that matters to them.  They want to read about read about something that poses a question different to what they’ve previously thought.
• Does the study show causation or correlation?
  • Determining the relationship between two aspects of a problem is very important to conclude results. Whether something is a cause of the other or just correlates is very important because it can either prove a question or just provide more evidence to back it up.
• What is the mechanism?
  • Knowing how a experiment was performed is important to know because it allows better understanding of what is being tested.
• How much do experiments reflect reality?
  • Some experimenters do a great job of designing how an experiment should be tested. Going out into the real world and finding direct results is going to provide better support rather than doing a test on something that doesnt use as good as methods.
• Could anything else explain the results?
  • This is a great question to ask because it goes back to the correlation vs causation debate. It is important to obtain results that provide evidence about direct results.  Being unsure about results is never a good thing when it comes to trying to convince a reader of an experiment.

I think that the question about correlation vs causation is helpful to discuss when talking about controversy because it allows both aspects to be talked about. It helps to talk about how an experiment correlates and also the causation between the data.

It has become apart to those of the science world that a human’s micro biome influences almost every other aspect of our body you could imagine. Recent studies have been done to suggest that our micro biome even plays a role in our mental health. One specific example talks about the impacts neurotransmitters have on the sensory receptors of the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve interacts with the gut and relays that information back to the brain to processed and dealt with. Just like psychological stress, pathogenic bacteria will cause certain signals to travel to the brain which end up having negative effects.

Mental health states such as depression end up having other side effects that correspond with it such as stress, diet, and taking antibiotics. These contributions in turn shape the bacteria that live within our gut. High stress causes our bodies to go into “fight-or-flight” mode which causes hormones to be released into the blood which ultimately affect almost every aspect in your body. In the gut, particularly, sympathetic hormones cause our digestion and overall GI tract to slow down. This linkage between the gut and the brain is more apparent than people believe, and should be taken into consideration more when thinking about mental health.

After completing the peer reviews on two other essays I received, I got new ideas about ways I could incorporate their style of writing into my own essay. I think it was helpful to have read other students work before I turn in my own final draft. I felt that the essays I reviewed were much better than the essay that I wrote. Not sure if that’s because it’s my essay, or if I just received essays from two great writers. I learned that I should explain the studies I reference more and their importance relating back to my thesis.

Peer reviewing is an important aspect when writing an essay. It allows you to read your peers essays and get a new perspective of what your essay should or should not look like. The process includes reading through the entire essay without interruption then going back and deciding what things to critique. It is important to give honest responses to your peers, so they are able to fix their paper for the better. For those who don’t frequently review scientific articles, it is important to keep in mind that the facts, data, evidence, and studies come from a reliable source and match the essays thesis. Some words and information may seem unfamiliar, and it is important to let the writer know that they might want to re-write that section of writing so it is easier to understand.

The pros of peer review is that the reader gets a new perspective on what another essay looks like. They are able to determine the good and bad things while reviewing which can be incorporated back into their own essay. The cons of peer reviewing is that the feedback we receive may not be what we want to hear. Something that you think you wrote really well, other people might not like as much.