Repeating what is already known without increasing understanding is a waste of resources.

Dear Editor, Recently, Palliative & Supportive Care published a study by Meggiolaro et al. (2015) that had the dual purpose of examining the rate of and difference between “emotional distress” (measured by the Distress Thermometer) and “maladaptive coping” (gauged with the Mini-MAC) and examining the association between those variables and cancer patients’ subjective perceptions of their interactions with their doctors (using The Physician Patient Satisfaction with Doctors Questionnaire). In the introduction to that paper, the authors made it clear that these topics certainly have been elaborated on in many previous studies, but they differentiated their work by including patients from three different countries in order to “extend our understanding.” Reading this study, however, a significant question presents itself: How can a repetition of correlations between these variables, even if conducted in different countries, “extend our understanding”? After ambitious statistical elaborations, Meggiolaro and colleagues (2015) provide us with many exact percentages, correlational coefficients, and p values. They then in the discussion summarize as follows: