A medical researcher is interested in investigating the ...

[AEWBW]

A medical researcher is interested in investigating the relationship between smoking and heart attacks How can you show that smoking causes heart attacks without being able to do a designed experiment?

Question 2

A medical researcher is interested in investigating the relationship between smoking and heart attacks What type of studies are plausible in this particular scenario, observational studies or experiments?

[mfedorka]

Answer to Question 1

Instead of conducting one simple observational study, conduct many observational studies, each looking at smoking and heart attacks from a different angle, for all different populations. Once the entire body of evidence from all these studies is examined, the connection can be seen between smoking and heart attacks.

Answer to Question 2

Observational studies are the only choice here. Experimental data would require the medical researcher to randomly assign some people to smoke and others not to smoke. This of course is not ethical.

[AEWBW]

TYSM

[bulacsom]

Thanks for the timely response, appreciate it