How much shyster do you want with your quack?

This is a book about ‘biostatistics’. It may seem to be stretching matters to include the Law. Surely medical statistics has little to do with legal statistics. What the Dickens is it doing here? We know that statisticians are interfering busybodies but there must be limits. What can be the justification for straying from clinical trials to legal trials, from cases and controls to cases in court?

None at all, were it not for one fact. Lawyers are always interfering with the business of physicians and if the medical profession has decided that evidence is largely a quantitative matter, then the lawyers, in meddling with medicine, are going to have to learn that lesson too. Evidence is far too serious a matter to be left to the legal profession to judge. To paraphrase Archie Cochrane, if we have evidence-based medicine shouldn't we have evidence-based law?

Did you have breast implants 15 years ago? Yes? And did you develop connective tissue disease five years ago. Yes? Well it's as plain as a lawyer's fee that the one caused the other, or at least it is until the medical statisticians become involved. My one appearance in court was in a case of this general type.