Research Catalog

Title

Dicing with death : chance, risk and health / Stephen Senn.

Author

Senn, Stephen

Publication

Cambridge, U.K. ; New York : Cambridge University Press, c2003.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xii, 251 p. : ill.; 23 cm.

Summary

The author explains here how statistics determines many decisions about medical care--from allocating resources for health, to determining which drugs to license, to cause-and-effect in relation to disease. He tackles big themes: clinical trials and the development of medicines, life tables, vaccines and their risks or lack of them, smoking and lung cancer and even the power of prayer. He entertains with puzzles and paradoxes and covers the lives of famous statistical pioneers. By the end of the book the reader will see how reasoning with probability is essential to making rational decisions in medicine, and how and when it can guide us when faced with choices that impact our health and/or life.

Subjects

• Medicine
• Medical statistics
• Philosophy, Medical
• Statistics as Topic > methods
• Medical care > Statistical methods
• Medicine > Philosophy
• Statistics > methods
• Models, Statistical
• Risk Assessment

Genre/Form

Medical statistics

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 231-244) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Circling the square -- The diceman cometh -- Trials of life -- Of dice and men -- Sex and the single patient -- A hale view of pills -- Time's tables -- A dip in the pool -- The things that bug us -- The law is a ass -- The empire of the sun.

ISBN

• 0521832594
• 9780521540230 (pbk.)
• 0521540232 (pbk.)

LCCN

^^2003053199

OCLC

• 52301632
• SCSB-10205676

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library