Personal note, and a recommended link... I'm swamped with work here -- housework and clerical work and stuff-my-agent-needs work and harvesting-the-bittersweet work -- and I have the book signing/reading for
Twenty-One Novel Poems in Berryville, Arkansas coming up on Saturday and need to get all the materials ready for that. I did have time this morning to respond to some of your excellent comments, but I've come to the end of it now and have to go tackle all those other things.
I do want to mention -- for those of you still interested in the context of the prayer-research sf short story we were discussing recently -- an article that Douglas Dee alerted me to: "Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?", by Gary Taubes. At:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16epidemiology-t.html?ref=magazine .
The article is in my opinion a
very good -- and very clear and thorough -- discussion of epidemiology and of problems with biomedical research study design. It's twelve pages long, and I recommend every single page.