Principles of Medical Statistics

The get-it-over-with-quickly approach to statistics has been encouraged - and often necessitated - by the short time allotted to it in most curriculums. If included at all, statistics is presented briefly, as a task to be endured mainly because pertinent questions may appear in subsequent examinations for licensure or other certifications. However, in later professional activities, clinicians and biomedical researchers will constantly be confronted with reports containing statistical expressions and analyses. Not just a set of cookbook recipes, Principles of Medical Statistics is designed to get you thinking about data and statistical procedures. It covers many new statistical methods and approaches like box plots, stem and leaf plots, concepts of stability, the bootstrap, and the jackknife methods of resampling. The book is arranged in a logical sequence that advances from simple to more elaborate results. The text describes all the conventional statistical procedures, and offers reasonably rigorous accounts of many of their mathematical justifications. Although the conventional mathematical principles are given a respectful account, the book provides a distinctly clinical orientation with examples and teaching exercises drawn from real world medical phenomena. Statistical procedures are an integral part of the basic background needed by biomedical researchers, students, and clinicians. Containing much more than most elementary texts, Principles of Medical Statistics fills the gap often found in the current curriculum. It repairs the imbalance that gives so little attention to the role of statistics as a prime component of basic biomedical education.

Alvan R. Feinstein