Dr Samantha Thomas: [This] graph, promoting gastric band surgery, was part of an advertisement targeted at DOCTORS about the benefits of this surgery. But can you spot the glaring problem with the statistics they show?
Are you talking about the massive loss to follow-up? They’ve got 812 patients at 6 month follow-up, but only counting the results from 12 patients at 48 months. Where’d all the others go? Why aren’t they counting them? Very naughty.
And is that +/-20.9% a SD or SE? What was the confidence interval?
That’s no how you do statistics.
IT MAKES ME SO ANGRY THAT THIS SHIT IS SWALLOWED BY DOCTORS.
Or, as Sonia said, “800 missing people! It’s like an episode of Lost!”