Ehh. Your experience is similarly anecdotal. You ignore that there is a placebo effect, blood pressure is a surrogate marker for cardiac events, and drugs can have adverse effects.
It’s best to look at all cause mortality in your example. Many studies have looked at that endpoint if you are curious.
Different strokes for different folks. Kent Beck is a very well-known programmer and likely needs no introduction. If he started every article on his personal blog regaling readers with his accomplishments, it might not be received as well as you suggest.
Clarification unrelated to the BMI comment, but the writeup isn't from nih.gov. The article is found through PubMed, a search engine and data repository. Your article was published in the 'British Journal of General Practice'. OP's article is from 'Cureus'. PubMed just has copies of the articles.
Saying its ironic that nih.gov has both articles is somewhat like saying its ironic that Google has any two articles.
Disclaimer directly from the linked webpages: "As a library, NLM provides access to scientific literature. Inclusion in an NLM database does not imply endorsement of, or agreement with, the contents by NLM or the National Institutes of Health. Learn more about our disclaimer."
A few months ago there was an MIT talk by Sebastien Bubeck about early tests with GPT-4.[0] He mentions that the tests he ran were on the model before it was RLHFed and if you tried to replicate the tests with the public version the performance was greatly degraded.
I definitely see what you are saying, but I don't think its procrastination. Knowledge compounds, meaning the more you learn, the more you can learn. Beyond learning, reading is associated with many positive outcomes, such as increased empathy[0] which is probably a differentiator in technical fields.
As for technical skills, I think it was Bob C. Martin or Andy Hunt who said that if you read one technical book a year you will be ahead of most of your peers.
My personal opinion is if there is a project you want to work on, do that. But if you aren't excited by anything at the moment, keep reading! Following your passions gives you a deep well of energy and it seems you are passionate about reading, so I'd lean into that and not worry too much about it. Its not the worst thing to be well-read.
"Retinoic Acid and Arsenic Trioxide for Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia" by Lo-Coco et al. from 2013.[0]
This paper presents a cure for an extremely aggressive cancer using vitamin A and arsenic. Its a unique, relatively benign treatment strategy that completely avoids chemotherapy. As far as I know this is the best result in all of oncology, though the cancer it treats is very rare.
The most well known paper in oncology that is probably more interesting to a general audience is "The Hallmarks of Cancer" by Hanahan and Weinberg.[1]
It’s best to look at all cause mortality in your example. Many studies have looked at that endpoint if you are curious.