What an Internist Needs to Know about Statistics

Abstract

The basics of medical statistics can be readily understood but are often approached by clinicians as if mysterious or forbidding. This may be because statistics was poorly taught at medical school or due to a tendency for articles on statistics to rapidly overcomplicate concepts. It is our hope that this series will be enlightening and provide a solid grounding in the building blocks to all evidence-based medicine.This series is divided into the three main statistical areas: descriptive statistics as may be used commonly in audit projects, inferential statistics as may be used in therapeutic trials, and diagnostic tests in which sensitivity and specificity are important. Statistical concepts are illustrated with examples predominantly from the critical care literature. The choice of examples, however, should be regarded as non-significant when compared with any personal clinical practice. (There is no p value for this statement.)