Month: December 2020

As I had not completed my rough draft in time to receive a peer review, I missed my opportunity to peer review someone else’s work. However, I have been a part of many peer reviews in the past, although I can’t say many were for review papers like ours. Looking at the guidelines for the review and from my past experience with reviews however, sometimes the experience of peer reviewing someone’s work can be awkward and difficult. Regarding the section on the rubric containing a section on language and wordage used in the paper, this is something that can be quite difficult to review. Although it is easy if someone has made blatant errors in spelling or grammar in their paper, there are times where someone has worded something not quite the way you would have, and you believe that your wordage would better suit the paper, but you are unsure of whether or not to provide that suggestion. That is something that can be a bit of personal preference, and the author of the work could take offense to you suggesting a different line of wording.

There is much to learn from peer reviewing however, and one of the most important is looking at work with fresh eyes. That can be extremely beneficial for all reviews, and it has been proven that having someone else read your papers can help catch errors and mistakes that were not apparent to the author, but are glaringly apparent to the person who is reading it for the first time. This is also why people suggest that you read your papers out loud, as giving voice to your words can make it seem like someone else is reading them, and you catch errors you would not have originally.

The process of peer review is a generally effective process that ensures that only factual and accurate information is released to the scientific community. The first step of the process involves a group of scientists generating a study and corresponding article based on the contents of that study. This article is then passed to a journal for publication. The journal then passes the article to other experts in whatever the article was written about. These experts ensure that correct methods were followed and the integrity of the scientific process was not violated. They also ensure that the conclusions drawn from the evidence in the study are accurate conclusions that can be made from those data. Then, if approved, the article is passed back to the journal for final publication.

Although the peer review process is generally a great model for ensuring that scientific works remain accurate, there are some glaring problems with it. One is that the experts who are peer reviewing the work may have some sort of monetary incentive from the journal to approve works, even if those works did not follow the correct processes. Additionally, if a work presents some sort of extravagant idea but the underlying data doesn’t necessarily support that idea, the reviewers may be inclined to approve it anyway because it will generate much revenue for the journal.

Another problem is that because the peer reviewers are experts in the same field as those that produced the work, there may be instances where a work is rejected simply because of competition between those experts and those who wrote the article. Also, theft of intellectual property could occur, and one scientists novel idea for studying some particular thing could be stolen my a reviewer.

However, the integrity in the scientific community is generally quite strong, and many value accurate facts and knowledge over money and societal pull, thus these instances are few and far between.

The use of antibiotics is an emerging subject with much controversy surrounding it. On one hand there are very many educated people that use antibiotics regularly and advocate for their use when used appropriately. On the other hand, there are very many educated individuals that advocate for antibiotic use only when absolutely necessary. Based on my knowledge of antibiotics and my experience, I stand somewhere in the middle.

I believe that the use of antibiotics in the medical field today is quite the problem. However, this is due to no fault of most doctors, as I trust that their education would guide them to make the most informed choices a majority of the time. Of course, there may be some doctors that choose to take the easy way out in terms of treatment, and antibiotics are amazingly effective in what they do. But providing antibiotics when some other treatment would suffice is an unnecessary risk that should be avoided.

Regarding my statement “to no fault of most doctors”, I mean that even if doctors were to only provide antibiotics when antibiotics are absolutely necessary, the problem of patient compliance presents new risks. Because doctors cannot force patients to complete their cycles of antibiotics, some patients will inevitable miss a dose, or several. To my knowledge, this is where the problems tend to arise. I remember seeing one study that showed how well bacteria survived under conditions in which antibiotics were present. The gist of it was that in high antibiotic environments, no bacteria would survive. However, if a bacterium were presented with a low antibiotic environment, over time it would proliferate and create a community with antibiotic resistance. It was found that after some resistance was incurred, some of these bacteria from this community could survive in high antibiotic environments, even when no bacteria from the original community could.

This is essentially the problem with patients not taking their antibiotics regularly, as they allow resistant bacteria the chance to form. Additionally, some patients think that they should stop their course of antibiotics as soon as the problem the antibiotics were intended to treat has gone away. This is a popular misconception that again lends to the generation of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

One intentional choice I make regarding my microbial communities is the consumption of the milk beverage kefir. However, now that I think about it, although it is touted as a probiotic, I am honestly not sure that the microbial communities present in kefir would actually impact the microbial state of my gut in a positive way. It seems like many companies are taking advantage of undereducated people by using buzzwords like ‘probiotic’. Even though something may be probiotic, it doesn’t mean that it will affect you in a positive way, or any way at all really. However, culturally, being from Serbia, I grew up consuming kefir, so even if I were to not drink it for the potentially effect on my microbial communities, I would drink it simply to enjoy.

Another intentional choice I make regarding my microbial communities is the decision to shower and maintain general hygiene using soaps and other cleansing products. As a child, I was quick prone to the fungus that causes jock itch, so I have personal experience with microbial communities affecting the health of my skin. Additionally, as an adult, I developed a case of pityriasis after long exposure to the sun on a daily basis. However, this decision can also negatively impact the health of my skin, as it could strip it of microbes that are actually beneficial to my skin. Despite this, the potentially detrimental affects of not cleaning the skin seem to far outweigh the potential negative effects of removing microbes that may be beneficial from my skin.

(1) Doctor of public health Michela Stillo in her review article “Safety of human papillomavirus vaccines: a review” (2015) asserts that evidence shows that despite common rumors regarding the adverse effects of vaccines, HPV vaccines are safe. Stillo cites evidence of adverse effects caused by HPV vaccines from randomly controlled trials published in peer reviewed articles. The purpose of this article is to prove that HPV vaccines are safe in order to increase vaccine coverage. The article seems to target more intellectual audiences, in hopes to arm them with information that can be provided to the laypeople.

My research proposal would be regarding the effects of microbes on human weight loss and gain. There is already an incredible amount of money being funneled into the study of human weight loss (less so into human weight gain) so this kind of proposal could be quick to be accepted and funded.

It has been shown that when germ free mice are inoculated with the microflora of an obese or lean person, those mice tend to mimic the weight of the person they received the microflora from, even if diet is the same between the two groups of mice. My proposal is to analyze the microbial contents of the microflora and determine what microbes are primarily responsible or at least whose presence is correlated with weight loss or gain. Then, as germ free mice tend to be quite unhealthy, take standard mice who have been exposed to a variety of conditions and attempt to change their weight by introducing these microbes. Eventually, if there is success in this stage, there could be trials done on humans in which we attempt to change the composition of their gut microflora in order to induce weight gain or loss. This sort of data would be invaluable to healthcare as it would allow doctors to reduce or increase the weight of their patients even if the patients are not compliant with doctors suggestions (as they usually are not). This sort of treatment would almost certainly be broadly implemented, provided there are no harsh side effects.

Cancer, depression, anxiety, irritable bowel syndrome, swelling of the brain, obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cystic fibrosis.

When comparing this list, although relatively short, to the one formed in writing exercise one, I see that there is a huge increase in the number of diseases I was able to list. Of course, this is because much of the conversation in this course was regarding microbes effects on humans, including their effects on non-infectious diseases. Some of the responses did overlap as I had some prior knowledge of microbes effects on the body.

The most important topics I will take away from this course are essentially that microbes can influence almost all human conditions. One of the most interesting to me personally was the effect that they have on human weight, and the microflora of an obese person is vastly different from that of a lean person.