4 ms·

...but I expect more from doctors. Is that really reasonable, though? Doctors don't have a use for statistics in their daily professional lives, and they almos

...but I expect more from doctors. Is that really reasonable, though? Doctors don't have a use for statistics in their daily professional lives, and they almost certainly have less free time in which to immerse themselves in a field of math that isn't going to help them. Journalists, on the other hand, often should or need to rely on statistics to convey useful and pertinent information in a meaningful way. That they often obviously aren't taught and otherwise usually don't learn statistics, or at least not effectively, strikes me as a much bigger problem than doctors who don't have that knowledge. Now, the people who write reports like these, they should have and use a thorough working understanding of statistics. I'd say what's really missing is effective collaboration between the people who do the work and the people who should be doing and writing the analysis.

syntaxfree 13y ago
1. Some large percentage, possibly more than half, of what a doctor does is diagnosis and prognosis. This is all pure probability. Failure to understand the difference between Prob(A|B) and Prob(B|A) has nontrivial consequences. 2. Frontier areas of medicine -- oncology, psychiatry -- deal increasingly with uncommon situations that not necessarily happen with enough frequency for a doctor to develop a doctorly intuition. There are some great resources -- meta-analyses, for example -- out there, but if we keep cutting slack to practitioners and let them follow the word of "thought leaders", medicine becomes the prey of ideological waves and conceptual fashions.
rayiner 13y ago
> Doctors don't have a use for statistics in their daily professional lives... You can't give patients good advice that allows them to make the trade-offs inherent in life without a solid grasp of statistics. Saying an IUD has 98% effectiveness is useless without citing the time span over which that probability is measured (2% will get pregnant per year, per 5 years, ever?) Saying that doing X increases the risk of outcome Y by Z% is useless without citing the base rate. Would you stop eating meat if it increased your risk of a rare cancer by 300% if the base rate was 0.01% (over a lifetime) to begin with? I don't know how you make diagnoses without knowing the relative statistical probability of conditions that may present with the same symptoms.
collyw 13y ago
> Doctors don't have a use for statistics in their daily professional lives I really think that depends on what they are doing. My girlfriend is a neurologist investigating new treatments from MS. She uses statistics packages daily. Her colleague has gone of to London for a year to study a statistics masters. Sure your average GP probably doesn't have much need for stats, but there are a lot of fields within medicine.
dragonwriter 13y ago
Unless they are practicing cargo cult medicine, doctors actually do need statistics regularly in their professional lives -- medicine isn't a static field and you can't keep up with the new results in the field without being able to understand and apply statistics.

syntaxfree 13y ago

1. Some large percentage, possibly more than half, of what a doctor does is diagnosis and prognosis. This is all pure probability. Failure to understand the difference between Prob(A|B) and Prob(B|A) has nontrivial consequences. 2. Frontier areas of medicine -- oncology, psychiatry -- deal increasingly with uncommon situations that not necessarily happen with enough frequency for a doctor to develop a doctorly intuition. There are some great resources -- meta-analyses, for example -- out there, but if we keep cutting slack to practitioners and let them follow the word of "thought leaders", medicine becomes the prey of ideological waves and conceptual fashions.

rayiner 13y ago

> Doctors don't have a use for statistics in their daily professional lives... You can't give patients good advice that allows them to make the trade-offs inherent in life without a solid grasp of statistics. Saying an IUD has 98% effectiveness is useless without citing the time span over which that probability is measured (2% will get pregnant per year, per 5 years, ever?) Saying that doing X increases the risk of outcome Y by Z% is useless without citing the base rate. Would you stop eating meat if it increased your risk of a rare cancer by 300% if the base rate was 0.01% (over a lifetime) to begin with? I don't know how you make diagnoses without knowing the relative statistical probability of conditions that may present with the same symptoms.

collyw 13y ago

> Doctors don't have a use for statistics in their daily professional lives I really think that depends on what they are doing. My girlfriend is a neurologist investigating new treatments from MS. She uses statistics packages daily. Her colleague has gone of to London for a year to study a statistics masters. Sure your average GP probably doesn't have much need for stats, but there are a lot of fields within medicine.

dragonwriter 13y ago

Unless they are practicing cargo cult medicine, doctors actually do need statistics regularly in their professional lives -- medicine isn't a static field and you can't keep up with the new results in the field without being able to understand and apply statistics.