what about all those perfectly good doctors who get a bad name from the few bad apples who bandy around statistics?
<grin>
I appreciate that it ain't just statisticians that get annoyed at Sir Roy. Obviously other doctors do too.
I am in no way defending the deliberate misuse of emotive "statistics" that appears to have occurred in this case.
Unfortunately this wasn't the issue. It wasn't a deliberate misuse of emotive stats, but simply that he didn't know his a*se from his elbow when it came to calculating probabilities. What he did was to say that something had a vanishingly small chance of being the case when it was actually pretty large. I.e. suggesting that a accidental death was 1 in several million when it was actually a large two digit percentage.
A little like him telling the patient of your example that they had a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of dying if their aneurism burst when the actual figure was 9 in 10 - to compare on a rough scale.
I am very often asked for figures by my punters to help them decide what they want to do e.g. have an operation, try one particular treatment or another.
And you have my sympathy. Nor would I be annoyed at a doctor who got his figures wrong in this instance.
What I'm cross about is this Sir Roy has taken the stand for a number of serious court cases (murder, for god's sakes) not to give medical evidence (for which he is qualified) but to give wrong statistics.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2003-12-10 02:43 pm (UTC)<grin>
I appreciate that it ain't just statisticians that get annoyed at Sir Roy. Obviously other doctors do too.
I am in no way defending the deliberate misuse of emotive "statistics" that appears to have occurred in this case.
Unfortunately this wasn't the issue. It wasn't a deliberate misuse of emotive stats, but simply that he didn't know his a*se from his elbow when it came to calculating probabilities. What he did was to say that something had a vanishingly small chance of being the case when it was actually pretty large. I.e. suggesting that a accidental death was 1 in several million when it was actually a large two digit percentage.
A little like him telling the patient of your example that they had a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of dying if their aneurism burst when the actual figure was 9 in 10 - to compare on a rough scale.
I am very often asked for figures by my punters to help them decide what they want to do e.g. have an operation, try one particular treatment or another.
And you have my sympathy. Nor would I be annoyed at a doctor who got his figures wrong in this instance.
What I'm cross about is this Sir Roy has taken the stand for a number of serious court cases (murder, for god's sakes) not to give medical evidence (for which he is qualified) but to give wrong statistics.