On the potential of academic epidemiology

Excerpt

I am honored to make some comments on professor Miettinen’s essay about progress in epidemiologic academia [1]. Professor Miettinen has made seminal contributions to epidemiology over the past half century and he casts his essay as a “swan song”, making this work particularly interesting and worthy of comment, even as he, reassuringly, holds out possibility for a “rebirth…at some future time”. Without over-distilling Miettinen’s essay, he suggests that there has existed in epidemiology a tension for quite some time, between whether epidemiology is a method, concerned with the development of theoretical approaches that can guide epidemiological research, or a content area that is concerned with the conduct of studies that can inform “community health”. Miettinen also laments that this confusion has persisted for the past five decades and that relatively few seem as concerned with it as much as he has been. …