Some tips about statistics on medical research

Since the word “statist” first mentioned by William Shakespeare in Hamlet, statistics has kept its mystery from us for hundreds of years. Until late 1940s, a clinical report was published British Medical Journal (BMJ), which evaluated the effect of streptomycin treatment of tuberculosis with randomized experiments, the application of statistics in medical researches has gradually gained its popularity (1,2). An editor in JAMA even compared statistics to a pillar of medicine, highlighting the importance of medical statistics in medicine (3).