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Article: Lies, damn lies and statistics: the statistics game.(Letters to the Editor)
- Article from:
- Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients
- Article date:
- October 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Townsend Letter Group. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Editor:
The first major medical discovery probably arose after mankind learned how to count. I visualize the first clinical study, an N=1, when a bright mother 100,000 years ago told her partner that a friend had eaten a certain plant and had died. Her family would no longer eat that plant. She might even have observed that that plant did not taste good and have associated toxic food with bitterness or some other bad taste. This observation would establish the rule that bitterness is associated with poison. No statistics were necessary. All she needed to do was to count. And that is how the relatively few species of plant life that are safe to eat were ...