Comment by alphaoverlord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alphaoverlord | Hacker News Reader

Just to be clear, and this might be tangential, but she is not a physician - I think she is a dietitian. I think its a fallacy to assume that only physicians publish in medical journals and there is a negligible link between over-the-top premeds and this article.

Mary M. Tai

www.ajcn.org/cgi/reprint/54/5/783.pdf

http://journals.lww.com/topicsinclinicalnutrition/Citation/1...

I can't access the article, so I can't make any comment on the actual methods, but I think it seems a little presumptuous to flippantly make broad strokes about a paper from a different field solely by looking at the abstract.

He does make a good point about overeager premeds (and for good reason), but this post seems to be more airing out grievences and stereotypes than an argument about education or differences between diciplines.

We found the same link... and you're correct, she isn't a physician.

In the Topics in Clinical Nutrition 1992 paper, she is listed as having an MS and an EdD. So, it's safe to say that she probably didn't realize that she was describing integration.

The entire post had a "I'm smarter than you" chip on your shoulder type of vibe.

It should also be noted that this paper had a number of letters to the editor about it, so in this case, I'd say that the process works (even if it got by the editors).

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8137688

I agree that it seemed to have this "I'm smarter than you" vibe, but the only reason I half-agreed is that I feel like it takes some nerve to try to name your discovery after yourself. It wouldn't be so bad if she called it the "curve-approximation method" or something like that; but coming up with something and deciding to name it after yourself feels kind of presumptuous and not exceptionally helpful to boot. (As far as I know, most concepts and ideas named after people weren't self-named; Dijkstra, arrogant as he was, published "A note on two problems in connexion with graphs," and never mentioned "Dijkstra's algorithm.")

Everything in medicine is named with arbitrary names of discoverers and so on. That's why you have to be good at rote memorization to get through med school - you can't even communicate with your colleagues otherwise.

This is a fundamental cultural difference between medicine and engineering.

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