Читать книгу Medical Statistics - David Machin - Страница 12

Although some health care practitioners may not carry out medical research, they will definitely be consumers of medical research. Thus, it is incumbent on them to be able to discern good studies from bad, to be able to verify whether the conclusions of a study are valid and to understand the limitations of such studies. The current emphasis on evidence‐based medicine (EBM), or more comprehensively evidence‐based health care (EBHC), requires that health care practitioners consider critically all evidence about whether a specific treatment works and this requires basic statistical knowledge.

Statistics is not only a discipline in its own right but it is also a fundamental tool for investigation in all biological and medical sciences. As such, any serious investigator in these fields must have a grasp of the basic principles. With modern computer facilities there is little need for familiarity with the technical details of statistical calculations. However, a health care professional should understand when such calculations are valid, when they are not and how they should be interpreted.

The use of statistical methods pervades the medical literature. In a survey of 305 original articles published in three UK journals of general practice: British Medical Journal (General Practice Section), British Journal of General Practice and Family Practice, over a one‐year period, Rigby et al. (2004) found that 66% used some form of statistical analysis. Another review by Strasak et al. (2007) of 91 original research articles published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in 2004 (one of the prestigious peer‐reviewed medical journals) found an even higher figure with 95% containing inferential statistics, for example, testing hypotheses and deriving estimates. It appears, therefore, that the majority of papers published in these journals require some statistical knowledge for a complete understanding.