'Naked Statistics' by Charles Wheelan - Review - NYTimes.com - 2 views
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Whether you are healthy, moribund or traversing the stages of decrepitude in between, every morsel of medical advice you receive is pure conjecture — educated guesswork perhaps, but guesswork nonetheless. Your health care provider and your favorite columnist are both mere croupiers, enablers for your health gambling habit.
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Staying well is all about probability and risk. So is the interpretation of medical tests, and so are all treatments for all illnesses, dire and trivial alike. Health has nothing in common with the laws of physics and everything in common with lottery cards, mutual funds and tomorrow’s weather forecast.
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Are you impressed with studies showing that people who take Vitamin X or perform Exercise Y live longer? Remember, correlation does not imply causation. Do you obsess over studies claiming to show that various dietary patterns cause cancer? In fact, Mr. Wheelan points out, this kind of research examines not so much how diet affects the likelihood of cancer as how getting cancer affects people’s memory of what they used to eat.
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An interesting article/review of a book that compares statistics and human health. Interestingly enough, it shows that statistics and studies about health are often taken to be true and misinterpreted because we want them to be true, and we want to believe that some minor change in our lifestyles may somehow prevent us from getting cancer, for example. More info about the book from the publisher: http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=24713