Zafar Ali, MD, MS

Hospitalist @KUMC | cardiology & data science research | RWRI | hiking, philosophy & epistemology.

[LindyMan @PaulSkallas]

A nice side effect of sports gambling is that it lowers the relative status of professional athletes in wider society. They are physical anomalities who have practiced the same repetitive movement since they were 8 years old.

They resemble captives

The Greek ideal of sport was to never do activities that reduce one's humanity.

[Zafar Ali, MD, MS @zafar_51]

I am not sure whether the reasons mentioned here are true, but in geopolitics, when one country is in trouble, others ask: how can we use this to our advantage? No permanent friendships in geopolitics—only Machiavellianism.

[Megatron @Megatron_ron]

BREAKING: 🇸🇦🇨🇳 Saudi Arabia has withdrawn from Chinese-led digital currency and blockchain payment system that reduces reliance on the US dollar, per FT

It appears that Saudi Arabia has accepted Trump's terms, and the US will join the war against the Houthis.

[Zafar Ali, MD, MS @zafar_51]

Pakistan has always been run by the military, either through direct dictatorship or indirectly. Whenever the military loses control or has major differences with the government, the government is thrown out. The current government is probably the most puppet in the history.

[BBC News (World) @BBCWorld]

Sister of Pakistan's ex-PM Imran Khan arrested https://t.co/yeufbQLwt5

[Zafar Ali, MD, MS @zafar_51]

In observational studies, even a confidence interval that doesn't cross 1 tells you little. With many covariates, the model you pick drives the estimate, and that vibration of effects isn't fixed by alpha correction. Big data makes this worse, not better: n buys you precision, not validity, so you get a precisely wrong answer with a tight interval around it. For multiple endpoints in a trial, alpha correction works. I think Dr. Prasad is talking about RCTs/Clinical trials only.

[Judea Pearl @yudapearl]

Most students in the quantitative sciences are forced to start their education with statistics, which is a grave mistake, with deep harmful consequences on the way students view science and reality. The next generation should start with causation, to get a scientific view of reality and, only then, take stat-101, for students who want to decorate their papers with p-values and regression analysis. Not sure the imperial forces of statistics would welcome this commonsensical transformation. @soboleffspaces @f2harrell @DagobertIX

[Zafar Ali, MD, MS @zafar_51]

@SeeFisch I think what we know is to avoid fever/high temperature but hypothermia is debated based on current evidence.

[Zafar Ali, MD, MS @zafar_51]

Does latent TB really mean latent bacilli, or is it an immunological response that we cannot differentiate from persistent latent bacilli? Previous data show that the risk is highest in the first few years. How do you account for or incorporate the duration since infection if it has been more than that?

[Zafar Ali, MD, MS @zafar_51]

@stijnnoorman In school lessons are optimized for passing exam which I don't think is true learning.

[Zafar Ali, MD, MS @zafar_51]

Another noisy study—melatonin prescription doesn’t mean the patient takes it, and no prescription doesn’t mean the patient doesn’t take it, since it is available OTC in US. Insomnia correlates with a lot of other diseases that no amount of adjustment can fully account for. There is no clear biological plausibility for an effect of this magnitude.

[Dr. Priyam Bordoloi @DocPriyamMD]

Melatonin is often seen as a harmless natural sleep aid. I have used it myself when residency wrecked my body clock. But a large preliminary study presented at the AHA linked use for ≥1 year in people with insomnia to a 90% higher heart-failure risk over 5 years.

[Zafar Ali, MD, MS @zafar_51]

@QuoteNietzsche Most would say the opposite.

[Primers Of Raphael Douady @DouadyPrimers]

See my article on LinkedIn about "Perverse AI", following the extraordinary resolution of Navier-Stokes problem.
https://t.co/aTHHmpSA5b

[Zafar Ali, MD, MS @zafar_51]

Most of the nutritional research is just noise.

[Zafar Ali, MD, MS @zafar_51]

If you are enjoying drinking coffee, keep drinking, it is not going to harm you. But the last thing I would do as to start drinking coffee because it has some mortality benefit, which is likely related to coffee drinker being different people than the one who don't drink it.

[Zafar Ali, MD, MS @zafar_51]

@drgarymcgowan @MohammedAlo I agree with that and I think he is more interested in increasing his social medical following rather than adhering to scientific rigor.

[Sensible Medicine @Sensible__Med]

The paper is an IQ test for reading science

[Zafar Ali, MD, MS @zafar_51]

@nntaleb Debt at the highest level, government continue to spend more, price/earnings at very elevated level (not to mention that reported earnings can include unrealized gains on stock holdings at some mega-cap companies), and inflation is likely to get worse.

[Zafar Ali, MD, MS @zafar_51]

Lowering lpa didn't show to have effect on MACE! https://t.co/iy95oRmzfp

[Zafar Ali, MD, MS @zafar_51]

Lowering a risk marker isn't the same as lowering risk. We will see if Lp(a) goes the same way.

[Zafar Ali, MD, MS @zafar_51]

To the outsider, everyone with a degree and a title looks like an expert, which, unfortunately, is not the case.