I very much approve of reading the actual papers. However...
Scientific papers are usually dry and hard to read.
I agree -- however, I find most people with some background in at least one science can at least glean something from reading the abstract, and hopefully some bits and pieces of the statistical analysis (something I admittedly wish I had better background in. If I could afford the time and money to go back to University, I'd love to take stats and philosophy of science).
If papers come to conflicting conclusions, it's hard to figure out which is right. If you're in the field, you read the papers (or at least glance at the abstracts), and have a good sense of which studies have been confirmed and which disproved.
I think part of the problem for many peoples that the state of knowledge in science isn't a binary proposition. In much of science, the answer to 'Is X true?" boils down to five possibilities: 'yes', 'yes with caveats', 'no', 'no with caveats', and 'uncertain' ("more research in this area is required"). So if you're seeing only a few studies, and they seem to be contradictory, the conclusion you need to take is simply "this area requires more research".
And that is my problem with how most people approach science. They see one study, and say 'Science says X!", when in reality, it's really just one study that says X. Unless you have a massive body of scientific work behind a concept (such as evolution, or gravitation), one can't really make any claims as to what "science" says. Consequently, you also shouldn't be disappointed if future research on a new or lightly researched area of science later produces a paper with a contradictory view -- you can't feel that this means that "Science was wrong!". Science is seldom, if ever, "wrong" -- but how much importance people put into preliminary/early/initial results can certainly make them mistakenly feel that way.
I'm somewhat reminded of how people with multiple sclerosis reacted to Dr. Paolo Zamboni's "liberation therapy". Here was a medical doctor who produced a paper where he looked at the neck veins of a group of people with MS, found they had some narrowing of the veins and iron deposits in the brain, and came up with an angioplasty procedure to open these veins up, believing that MS was caused by "chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency" (basically, insufficient blood drainage from the brain). He tried it on his own wife, she subjectively said she felt a bit better, and suddenly MS sufferers around the world were flying to third-world countries to have this done to them (for a fee, of course), and in some countries (like Canada) were begging their national governments to bring the procedure on-shore and to make it part of the social healthcare system.
Unfortunately, Dr. Zamboni's research was deeply flawed. Firstly, his study wasn't "blinded". It also didn't have a comparison group -- he didn't even look for vein narrowing in non-MS populations. Thirdly, he didn't disclose that he had financial ties to a company that made equipment to treat the condition he had "discovered". These are all problematic, but IMO the worst was really the lack of a comparison group for control purposes. As two further studies have shown, the type of vein narrowing Dr. Zamboni detected are equally prevalent in both people with MS and people without MS.
Now MS is a terrible disease. People who suffer from MS live in a sort of quiet bravery, in constant struggle against their condition, and with a lot of hope for a cure. I hope one is found. Unfortunately, all too many of them jumped on this one, and got ill-advised procedures done, which in some cases has led to a worsening of their symptoms, and even death. Damage has been done, all because one paper made a lot of hopeful people jump up and say "Science says X!", when really all that "science" should be saying (and what most scientists in this area actually said) was "this is a potentially interesting result -- let's do more research in this area to see if it goes anywhere".
Truth be told, the vast bulk of science output tends to come down to "more research in this area is needed". That's what the "common man on the street" misses when they see a "result" in a single paper. Sure research needs to be taken only as a stating point for more research -- and not an end-point recommending what people need to do. As a process, science requires a lot of time to really get to the point where it can say 'X is true (with caveats)'.
(As an aside, one general scientific area that I'm interested in is negative results: science that doesn't work. The kind of science where the preliminary result says "we hypothesized this might be true, but we now know it isn't". Not enough of this sort of science seems to happen (or get good funding/publicity) anymore, unless you're disproving someone else original, positive result. The negative result is extremely scientifically honest, and sets up some useful boundaries for what we think might be true. Unfortunately, even scientists want to be the people who discover the next big thing, and many funding organizations want to fund science that leads directly to some result they can sell, making it harder to do science that discovers where the edges of knowledge are.)
Yaz
(For the record, educated as a scientist, but not currently working in primary research)
