1 Boring Old Man

I did want to jump in and thank PsychPractice for mentioning my jaunt into statistics [in the land of sometimes… 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 & john henry’s hammer… 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5] and for giving it a test drive [DIY Study Evaluation]. I’m not a statistician, and I’ll be glad to hear when I get things wrong. But I’ve decided that a lot of the reason people are not reading these clinical trials critically is that all the modern talk of statistical modelling and linear regression etc puts people off. Either they don’t understand the analytic methodology or worse – it’s presented in a deliberately obfuscating way to keep the reader from looking behind all the fancy talk. What I’m proposing is that the average medical reader can easily learn how to use a few simple tools to quickly decide if one is being served a plate of science or dish of something else. At least in my specialty, psychiatry, the industry generated clinical trial reports have been heavily weighted on the south side of something else. There are more statistical things to say before I’m done.