Rationale for the multidisciplinary approach in epidemiological research.
Science has demonstrated that most macro-world phenomena are explicable by means of mechanisms taking place on a smaller scale. Epidemiologists, who by themselves work only with countable phenomena of the macro-world, must collaborate with specialists in subjects below the macro-level if they wish to improve the explanatory power and validity of their results. Multidisciplinary collaboration is particularly necessary in four phases of epidemiological investigations: hypothesis generation, data production, methodological design improvement, and the validation of epidemiological results. Collaboration with other specialists on the validation of results is important because of the fundamental difficulties which hinder the valid repetition of epidemiological studies and the long time it takes to accomplish systematic, epidemiological validation studies. Simpler and quicker alternative ways of reassessing epidemiological results are tests involving the biophysical structures of organs, cells, organelles, macro-molecules and so on. This argument is illustrated by examples from the Norwegian Thyroid Cancer Project.
Glattre
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Cancer Registry of Norway, Oslo.
D004812:Epidemiologic Methods; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D015994:Incidence; D008297:Male; D009664:Norway; D013964:Thyroid Neoplasms / Q000453:epidemiology*