Naked Statistics

You can hate math and not give a whit about statistics. But if you care about your health, you will finish up your summer reading with a fantastic new book: Naked Statistics. Stripping the Dread from the Data.

Healthy Survivors obtain sound knowledge about their medical challenges and treatment options, so they can make wise decisions. That's impossible without at least a rudimentary understanding of statistics.

Healthy Survivors find and nourish realistic hope. That's impossible unless they understand the statistics that help them differentiate hopeful therapies from those that stir only false hope and wishful thinking.

This book is for those of you who know and believe that learning some statistics will help you (i.e., you have knowledge and hope), but you can't seem to take action and learn statistics.

Author "Wheelan strips away the arcane and technical details and focuses on the underlying intuition that drives statistical analysis...there's not a dull page in sight." [From the dust jacket--that removeable paper cover of book.]

Since reading the book, I've been amazed at the number of times over the course of a day that statistics has played a significant role in an article or advertisement -- and how my response has been shaped by the insights offered in Naked Statistics.

Naked Statistics' statistics:

• 255 pages on nice paper with an easy font
• 13 chapters, plus a short introduction and a short conclusion
• 5 of the chapters have their own appendix to make it easy for number-phobes to skip the "number-ey" discussions
• 1 appendix on statistical software

 

 

 

Comments

[Liz]

At a minimum it would be useful for people to understand a handful of things even if they had no clue about math. For instance: the difference between absolute and relative risk, what is means for something to be statistically significant (and also recognize the same concept when they use the term confidence interval) and how that applies to groups of people where (typically) 5% don't fit and what applies to groups doesn't mean it absolutely will apply to you (as you might be in that 5%); when an "n" of 1 (eg your own personal experience or that of a friend) doesn't negate statistics...

Yeah and also that this stuff works all the time, not just when you want it to

[Wendy S. Harpham, M.D.]

Dear Liz,
Thanks so much for your comment.

People can get tripped up by words that mean one thing in the context of statistics and another when used in everyday language.

Learning that a treatment results in a "significant" improvement in a clinical trial may lead a patient to feel very hopeful to the point of expecting a good result when the data, in fact, suggest only that the treatment is better than doing nothing.

I expect to share a few other thoughts from the book in some future posts. With hope, Wendy