Forget Peer Review: Dr. Susan Culican looks to the crowd for untrained eyes & unconventional funding

PeerSpectrum | Journeys in Medicine

Welcome back. During our last episode we had an incredible conversation with the founders of Experiment.com, a very novel and exciting platform for crowd funding scientific research. If you missed this episode, definitely check it out. Keith and I came away so impressed with their venture, we decided to take a deeper look at some of the current research. One experiment really jumped out, so we invited the lead researcher to join us. That researcher is today's guest, Dr. Susan Culican, professor of Ophthalmology and residency directory at the Washington University School of Medicine, and the St. Louis Children's Hospital. We covered a lot of ground in this episode: alternatives to traditional grant funding, resident education and best of all... Susan's current research that ...get ready... actually challenges the long held assumption that only surgeons have the expertise to reliably assess surgical skill. Her experiment seeks to prove that non-clinicians (i.e. the public) while viewing surgical videos can assess surgical skill just as accurately as highly skilled attendings. Not a chance, you say! Well, see how you feel at the end of this episode. You might just change your mind. With that said, let's get started.