Scientific inquiry: why don’t surgeons practice what they preach?

Excerpt

The article “Fundamental principles of validation and reliability: rigorous science for the assessment of surgical education and training” was written specifically to bring to attention the current status of the efforts to assess and validate various new educational and training tools that are becoming available. Pioneering work by Richard Reznick, Sir Alfred Cuschieri, Jonathan Meakins, Gerald Fried, Sir Ara Darzi, Anthony Gallagher, and others, brought this critical need of scientific rigor to our evaluation process. Numerous other investigators have followed, with particular interest in validation of the emerging surgical simulators. The problem has become that of standardization of what will be measured and how to perform the measurements. All the different authors have different approaches to the “validation” of their training system—some are good whereas others are lacking. But most important, it is nearly impossible to compare results because each investigator (or group) is using different validation tools (with different interpretations of what the validation means) in such a manner that there is rank confusion in trying to interpret results. …