There are a couple people picking on this research in the thread. This is a preliminary study, just a "bullshit test" to see if this woman is crazy or if she's not. It's obvious that she's not crazy, because all she's doing is sniffing t-shirts and she doesn't know who they belong to. The sample size is large enough, we have a p-value of no more than p=0.0012, and that's under the cynical assumption that she somehow knew that exactly seven of the twelve samples would have Parkinson's... something that the scientists didn't know.
So we know that something is going on here. The next steps are to control potential confounding variables and to determine the sensitivity and specificity of the test, if it's shown that she's not actually detecting some confounding variable. This is where you go double-blind, you use larger sample sizes, et cetera, now that you have money. You have money because the preliminary research was promising.
And we're not just getting a good test out of this. If there's an actual chemical that she's smelling, then there's some chemical process that's going on in people with Parkinson's which isn't happening in people without Parkinson's (or vice versa). Tracing these chemical pathways could give us clues to the etiology of the disease, which would be a REALLY BIG DEAL. Or maybe it's just a rabbit hole.
So we know that something is going on here. The next steps are to control potential confounding variables and to determine the sensitivity and specificity of the test, if it's shown that she's not actually detecting some confounding variable. This is where you go double-blind, you use larger sample sizes, et cetera, now that you have money. You have money because the preliminary research was promising.
And we're not just getting a good test out of this. If there's an actual chemical that she's smelling, then there's some chemical process that's going on in people with Parkinson's which isn't happening in people without Parkinson's (or vice versa). Tracing these chemical pathways could give us clues to the etiology of the disease, which would be a REALLY BIG DEAL. Or maybe it's just a rabbit hole.