Changes needed in style and content of teaching statistics to medical undergraduates

Abstract

The negative attitude of medical undergraduates towards statistics could be ascribed to adherance to traditional statistical topics, foreign to the medical sciences. The need is to teach in a medical language. This communication describes the change needed in style and content of teaching to implement this strategy. The medical topics are identified and the details of teaching specified. A discussion on normal values, their clinical significance, diagnostic criteria, and choice of diagnosis provides opportunity to teach measures of location and dispersion, distributions, type I and II errors, and some probability. Interpretation of laboratory results and of medical literature brings out essentials of sampling, some aspects of design and meaning of P-values.