Less Research Is Needed

Research being carried out at the Microscopy lab of the . This photo was taken on July 28, 2006 using a Nikon D70. For more information about INL’s research projects and career opportunities, visit the lab’s facebook site. http://www.facebook.com/idahonationallaboratory (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From a thoughtful 25 June 2012 post at The Health Care Blog

he most over-used and under-analyzed statement in the academic vocabulary is surely “more research is needed”.

These four words, occasionally justified when they appear as the last sentence in a Masters dissertation, are as often to be found as the coda for a mega-trial that consumed the lion’s share of a national research budget, or that of a Cochrane review which began with dozens or even hundreds of primary studies and progressively excluded most of them on the grounds that they were “methodologically flawed”.

Yet however large the trial or however comprehensive the review, the answer always seems to lie just around the next empirical corner.

With due respect to all those who have used “more research is needed” to sum up months or years of their own work on a topic, this ultimate academic cliché is usually an indicator that serious scholarly thinking on the topic has ceased. It is almost never the only logical conclusion that can be drawn from a set of negative, ambiguous, incomplete or contradictory data…

Related articles

• Understanding the nuances of evidence-informed healthcare (thehindu.com)

Consensual Sex In Elderly Care Homes – Ageism And Safety Concerns

Regardless of what one thinks about sex outside marriage, this issue is certainly not going to go away in the near and far future as long as the elderly are institutionalized and/or live in residential care facilities.

From the 25 June 2012 Medical News Today article

An article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics reveals that elderly care home residents are often needlessly denied consensual sex because of concerns regarding safety and ageism. 

Researchers from the Australian Centre for Evidence Based Aged Care state that even though elderly people, including those with early stage dementia, often still enjoy a sexual relationship in their own homes, but once they move into residential care, a sexual relationship is often frowned upon.

The researchers say that factors, such as safety fears, insufficient privacy, concerns about duty of care, anxieties about potential repercussions from relatives, and ageism often take away people’s “basic human right”, standing in the way of “a normal and healthy part of ageing.” ….

Related articles

• Care home patients with dementia being ‘denied sex’ (independent.co.uk)
• Safety fears and agism denying care home residents right to consensual sex (eurekalert.org)
• Nursing Homes Aren’t Letting Old People Have Enough Sex [Aging] (jezebel.com)
• Care centers deny elderly the right to sex: medical journal (rawstory.com)
• Dementia patients’ desires left in the cold (abc.net.au)