Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Some interesting facts from the field of medicine

and how faith-based it can be, from Craig Feied. Here are some that I found noteworthy:
  • 80% of fatal blood clots are not diagnosed until autopsy
  • many cancer patients are found to have died from a different cancer than the one for which they were diagnosed
  • clinical judgment is only 50% correct
  • a "good test", i.e. one with a 1% false-positive and 1% false negative rate, will only yield 50% accuracy if the disease being tested for is prevalent in 1% of the population
  • inferential tests for conditions such as lung cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and diabetes have less than a 20% accuracy rate

I added the bikini statistics tag. Here are some previous posts sharing that tag, with the following definition:
Statistics are like a bikini. What they present is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital--Aaron Levenstein

No comments:

Post a Comment