It’s easy to do since we just get handed a headline and a nih.gov link that presents the work no different than a study, but you’re evaluating it on different c

It’s easy to do since we just get handed a headline and a nih.gov link that presents the work no different than a study, but you’re evaluating it on different criteria than it was written or published for. It’s a discursive, exploratory essay published to the BMJ by a working/clinical physiotherapist to share some intuitions they’ve developed from reflecting on personal and clinical experiences. The journal it was published to has many different forms of work that it shares, clearly indicated in format and heading, selected by their assumed value to other professionals in the field. The person writing this probably did not believe they established scientific proof of sleep postures, nor would the editors or readers who encountered the article in its original form have thought such a claim was being made. It just would have been an interesting perspective to think about, maybe, before moving on to another article in the journal. 22 years later, it’s interesting how we’ve gotten used to ignoring context and judging everything by one criteria. Some of that’s probably due to efforts to normalize information as “data” with a predetermined schema so that it fits nicely in a database and only needs one stylesheet. It’s kind of a shame, though, because it makes it a lot harder to appreciate things as they are, because we get so caught up in seeing them as a poor version of something else.