ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Medical statistics

Medical statistics is like counting the number of apples in a basket or toys in a toy box. Doctors and researchers use medical statistics to help them understand how likely a certain treatment or medicine is to work. They also use it to help them understand how many people are affected by a disease or illness.

Imagine you have a group of 100 kids, and you want to know how many of them have glasses. You could ask each of them one by one, but that would take a long time. Instead, you could count how many kids are wearing glasses right now. Let's say you count 20 kids wearing glasses. You could say that 20% of the kids in the group wear glasses.

Doctors and researchers use similar methods to understand how diseases and treatments affect people. They might look at a group of 100 patients who all have the same disease and see how many of them get better with a certain medicine. They might also compare this medicine to another medicine to see which one is more effective.

Medical statistics can be tricky, so doctors and researchers have to be careful. They have to make sure they don't draw the wrong conclusions based on their data. It's like counting the toys in a toy box and making sure you don't accidentally count the same toy twice.

So, in summary, medical statistics is all about counting things in medicine to help doctors and researchers understand how diseases and treatments affect people.