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medpundit |
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Saturday, March 03, 2007People born under the astrological sign of Leo are 15% more likely to be admitted to hospital with gastric bleeding than those born under the other 11 signs. Sagittarians are 38% more likely than others to land up there because of a broken arm. Those are the conclusions that many medical researchers would be forced to make from a set of data presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science by Peter Austin of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto. At least, they would be forced to draw them if they applied the lax statistical methods of their own work to the records of hospital admissions in Ontario, Canada, used by Dr Austin. Dr Austin, of course, does not draw those conclusions. His point was to shock medical researchers into using better statistics, because the ones they routinely employ today run the risk of identifying relationships when, in fact, there are none. He also wanted to explain why so many health claims that look important when they are first made are not substantiated in later studies. The amazing thing is, most medical researchers hire statisticians (or computers) to run the numbers for them. Maybe that's the problem. The statitisticians run the numbers but have no idea how the results will be put to use. And the researchers don't have a clue about how to incorporate them into their paper. They just figure if it's statistically significant, it must be significant. posted by Sydney on 3/03/2007 08:41:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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