Statistical Questions in Evidence-based Medicine

Book excerpt: Statistical Questions in Evidence-based Medicine is a companion volume to the new edition of An Introduction to Medical Statistics and includes questions and answers which are complementary to the textbook. This new book takes a practical approach that develops an understanding of statistics and suggests appropriate questions to ask about research methods, figures and conclusions and whether they are evidence based. The book is a model of clarity and common sense in what is frequently an unnecessarily obscure area of science. It looks at the application of and provides a critique of statistics, encouraging an evidence-based approached to medical statistics. Through the critical evaulation of the published medical literature, the text will enable both students and researchers to understand the appropriate use of descriptive and inferential statistics in study design and when writing papers. The reproduction of short excerpts of material from published papers or summaries of their results are included and they are considered in a question and answer format. The reader can either read through the series of cases and follow through worked examples or work through the book themselves as a series of exercises. The questions are clearly graded, through the use of icons, in terms of difficulty into standard and postgraduate levels. This book will prove invaluable to students, medical researchers and doctors alike.