What is the role of statistics in medicine statistics?

Answer 1

For decades, biostatistics has played an integral role in modern medicine in everything from analyzing data to determining if a treatment will work to developing clinical trials. The School of Global Public Health defines biostatistics as "the science of obtaining, analyzing and interpreting data in order to understand and improve human health."

Virtually any medical research study uses biostatistics from beginning to end. "Statisticians help medical researchers design studies, decide what data to collect, analyze data from medical experiments, help interpret the results of the analyses, and collaborate in writing articles to describe the results of medical research." To make it even plainer: biostatistics helps researchers make sense of all the data collected to decide whether a treatment is working or to find factors that contribute to diseases.

As such, it is important that statistics are used in medicine in order to justify the development and subsequent use of a particular drug or treatment; as well as identifying in the first place whether it is having the desired effect at all.

At the heart of the use of statistics in medicine is the seemingly insurmountable problem that everybody is different. Not only in a psychological sense, but a physiological sense too. While human beings may share similar organs, tissues and chemical compounds; how they are bonded, how we are composed and the effects different drugs have on the individual can be radically different from one person to the next.

Therefore, to measure the effectiveness of any form of medication, it is important to run trials where a wide variety of subjects are administered the drug. Firstly, this helps gage the effectiveness of the medicine when compared to, for example, a placebo. Subsequent statistical analysis can also give medical professionals and pharmaceutical companies the information they need to judge whether the medicine is an effective treatment for the majority of patients; and whether it is a cost-effective solution to a particular ailment.