Thank you, I'm blushing. I don't have a medical background but my mom was a doctor. And I'm curious about a lot of things so a researcher by nature. When I got the Bad News Biopsy last fall, it was my habit to dive into the literature. For one thing, I wanted to learn as much as possible so my doctors' consults didn't waste time on the basics but we could spend the time looking at treatment possibilities. I took quantitative analysis coursework in school so that helped put the studies' statistics in perspective.

There was a brilliant article by the New York Times writer, Natalie Angier, about medical statistics. She wrote about the scientists Stephen Jay Gould was diagnosed with a rare, vicious cancer in his 30s and, basically, could expect to die soon. He analyzed all of the studies and found a lot of holes in the studies, bad statistics, corrupted data pools, etc., and picked his own treatment path and decided the data against survival were basically junk. Then he lived another 30 or so years and died of something else.

I read that article in a book of her science essays and never forgot it. All studies of human subjects are inherently flawed because we are not perfect substitutes for each other so isolating just one variable and freezing all the other identical variables is impossible. If we can do our best to get, and remain, healthy, we're already better than the mean (average) versus most study data universes. I find that very encouraging. And liked Stephen Jay Gould. And Mark Twain's, "There's lies, damn lies and statistics?"