These three lessons provide a brief yet comprehensive overview of the most frequently used and most important descriptive and inferential biostatistical methods as they are relevant for the clinician. The goal is that the you will appreciate how the application of the theories of measurement, statistical inference, and decision trees contributes to better clinical decisions and ultimately to improved patient care and outcomes.
Conceptual understanding, rather than computational ability, will be the focus. Development of an adequate vocabulary, an examination of fundamental principles and a survey of the widely used procedures or tools to extract information from data, will form a basis for fruitful collaboration with a professional biostatistician when appropriate.
The object, then, is to help you understand the tools and procedures that are used in statistics enough to be an intelligent consumer of the research literature and to know when to ask a biostatistician to help you when you actually need to compute some statistics. So the objective is not to make you into a biostatistician, but into an appreciator of the contributions biostatistics can make to the appropriate care of your patients, and into an intelligent decision maker as to when to seek the appropriate help from a professional biostatistician. The needs of practicing physicians, not the skills to be a biostatistician or for sophisticated medical research, will inform the instruction.
|Goal of Experimental Method/Usefulness of Biostatistics|
Goal of Experimental Method:
Determine sample size needed to detect clinically relevant effects - (Beta or False Negatives).
Control for effects of one or more confounding variables.
Assist in developing alternative designs for human experiments.
Use maximum information content measurement.
Measure intangibles such as intelligence, depression, and well-being.
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