Anatomy Of Human

• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: For Dummies; 1 edition (July 29, 2013)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1118553985
• ISBN-13: 978-1118553985
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,841 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #5 in Books > Medical Books > Basic Sciences > Biostatistics

I have been teaching biostatistics for more than a dozen years and I am always looking for a book that is readable, thoughtful and not too technical for a math phobic audience. This book does very well on all three criteria and will now be on my short list with Biostatistics: The Bare Essentials, 3e and Intuitive Biostatistics: A Nonmathematical Guide to Statistical Thinking. The prose is clear and the for dummies margin icons for important/dangerous/etc topics really helps to make this an easy and fast read. The book is not too shallow in the topics that are covered. I was not pleased when I saw Bayesian statistics were missing from the index but those ideas are mentioned as web bonus material. There is a bit of mathematical notation early on but readers who truly hate it will be able to read around it without loosing the gist.

The one real shortcoming of the book is the lack of a cohesive introduction to any statistical package. All the major packages (SAS, R, SPSS, etc) are introduced and many of the less expensive options (including web resources) are mentioned. The coverage of the packages are balanced (but the comments on SAS are not entirely true). The book would be much stronger with a web compendium that explains how to do all the common analyses in the common packages.

The book does an excellent job of encouraging people to think about data, as opposed to just doing math.

BIOSTATISTICS FOR DUMMIES is a 390 page book on biostatistics where the emphasis is on clinical trials. From my own experience as a medical writer, I know that Clinical Study Protocols, Clinical Study Reports, Investigators Brochures, and so on, make frequent use of statistical concepts and formulas such as, alpha value, type I error, type II error, Kaplan-Meier plots, Z statistic, t statistic, P value, confidence interval, standard deviation, and others. Most of these formulas are described in this book. This book takes care to explain concepts that might be overlooked in other statistics textbooks, such as the fact that the determination of a P value, "is arbitrary, it depends on how much of a risk youre willing to take of being fooled by random fluctuations, that is, of making a Type I error. Over the years, the value of 0.05 has become accepted as a reasonable criterion for declaring significance" (page 43). This type of description provides a good background for the medical writer. For example, this morning I was reading a Clinical Study Protocol, which had been submitted with a SPA, where the P value for interim analysis was 0.002 and where the P value for analysis when the clinical trial was completed was 0.04. The book fails to provide guidance on how to solve any formulas in biostatistics. The book fails to include any problem sets, and it certainly does not include any answers. This book will not enable any novice to understand any statistical formulas. On the other hand, if you already understand biostatistics and know how to work the formulas by hand, then this book will be useful for tying all of the formulas together, and for providing a "big picture" of biostatistics. The book takes the same tactic as that taken by actor Robert Preston in THE MUSIC MAN.