This is an almost literary book based on concepts used in biostatistics and statistics applied to medical uncertainty contexts. With this, the book bases its scientific research on the random observation of data and statistical methods with mathematical explanations but avoiding complicated definitions and mathematical developments.
The book contains 21 chapters with an applied statistical basis: Medical uncertainties, Basics of medical studies, Sampling methods, Designs for observational studies, Medical experiments, Clinical trials, Numerical methods for representing variation, Presentation of variation by figures, Some quantitative aspects of medicine, Clinimetrics and evidence-based medicine, Measurement of community health, Confidence intervals, principles of tests of significance, and sample size, Inference from proportions, Relative risk and odds ratio, Inference from means, Relationships: quantitative data, Relationships: qualitative dependent, Survival analysis, Simultaneous consideration of several variables, Quality considerations and Statistical fallacies. The book has also three appendices: Statistical software, Some statistical tables and Software illustrations.
Two possible ways to improve this book would be (1) The inclusion of mathematical proofs of the suggested methods and (2) The recompilation of philosophical and bioethical essays or master lines and protocols of them for the correct application of statistical methods for human populations taking also into account moral direction.
The author's style uses many examples of medical situations to illustrate the proposed statistical methods. However, the book does not indicate the veracity of these methods in practice with objective philosophical analysis. It provides a classical viewpoint of statistics but without critical considerations of its real utility.
The book exhibits a careful presentation as it is usual in this series. It is an encyclopedic book which informs the reader about some of the classic statistical techniques applied to real health data. Each chapter has a list of references both for the statistical and medical content. Many figures and tables illustrate the explanations.
I recommend this book to all readers interested in the basic classic statistical methods useful in the area of medical biostatistics as an overview of such methods. But to do statistical studies in medicine, the book must be complemented by other additional formation in morals, bioethics, objective inference and sampling of finite populations.