When it comes to understanding what makes people tick — and get sick — medical science has long assumed that the bigger the sample of human subjects, the better. But new research led by UC Berkeley suggests this big-data approach may be wildly off the mark. That’s largely because emotions, behavior and physiology vary markedly from one person to the next and one moment to the next. So averaging out data collected from a large group of human subjects at a given instant offers only a snapshot, and a fuzzy one at that, researchers said.
The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, have implications for everything from mining social media data to customizing health therapies, and could change the way researchers and clinicians analyze, diagnose and treat mental and physical disorders.
“If you want to know what individuals feel or how they become sick, you have to conduct research on individuals, not on groups,” said study lead author Aaron Fisher, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. “Diseases, mental disorders, emotions, and behaviors are expressed within individual people, over time. A snapshot of many people at one moment in time can’t capture these phenomena.”[…]
Source: Everything big data claims to know about you could be wrong – ScienceBlog.com
msamba 
I totally agree. Humans are too individualized to draw sustainable conclusions from group research. That is one of the weaknesses of the modern medicine that they treat everybody the same way, more or less, for the same ailment, disregarding the individual condition. But then … in Denmark they have 10 minutes for a consultation now, how much can be found out about a person in 10 minutes? That’s nearly like speed dating.
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It’s the same here. 10 minutes for a consultation and get reliance on each person falling within normal parameters. but then again there will be sinister aspects to medicine tailored to each person’s genetic predispositions…
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Sinister? How do you mean? Manipulation?
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In the same way some cultures choose baby boys over girls, and to abort downs syndrome pregnancies the choices facing people could lead to unexpected consequences…
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