In my experience, to a doctor, even a good one, _at first_ it's just an annoying thing they have to do to get published and they don't really understand the significance of significances.
There is an entire medical discipline that knowingly uses shitty statistics[0]. Then there are the ones who unknowingly use shitty statistics[1]. Absent someone with a qualification that is impossible to get without learning real statistics as a co-author the default when reading medical research should be that the result is either overblown or wrong.
Biologists aren't much better than medical doctors, to my knowledge.
Just recently Science published, and NASA had a PR hoopla about a bogus paper about arsenic life, after it went through the usual Science peer "review" process. The paper was dicredited by numerous Comment papers for outrageously bad statistics and bad methodology, which Science actually published. For reasons I don't really understand, Science did not redact the paper and called the ensuing outrage normal scientific discourse, even though I think they would have benefited from a mae culpa moment regarding their peer review.
There is an entire medical discipline that knowingly uses shitty statistics[0]. Then there are the ones who unknowingly use shitty statistics[1]. Absent someone with a qualification that is impossible to get without learning real statistics as a co-author the default when reading medical research should be that the result is either overblown or wrong.
Biologists aren't much better than medical doctors, to my knowledge.
[0]http://lesswrong.com/lw/72f/why_epidemiology_will_not_correc...
[1]http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-dam...