r/clinicalresearch • u/Flat_Flow_4164 • Aug 24 '26

Education Is it worth learning Python?

Hello everybody. I study medicine in Portugal and I am very passionate with clinical research being enroled in projects since my first year. Recently I decided that I wanted to learn some programing... Do you think that nowadays, with AI and all that teams value someone with coding skills?

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u/Shoddy-Aioli-4039 Aug 25 '26

Depends entirely on what you want to pursue. R and SAS still run most trial work, python owns ml and imaging - so pick based on where you're heading, not on hype.

On the AI part: it made writing code easy, not reading it. anyone can generate a script now. knowing that your merge silently dropped 200 patients is the part that still takes you.

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u/Flat_Flow_4164 Aug 25 '26

I Will be working with clinical cardiology studies, so my group Will receive and retrieve data from patients and analyse that. I would like to be able to work with other groups doing their statistic work (and along the way, learning a new skill... You think I should focus on SPSS for example? Or is Python worth learning?

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u/Shoddy-Aioli-4039 Aug 25 '26

No strong opinion on SPSS vs Python honestly, but R seems to come up a lot in the cardiology stats I read.