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Avoiding Subjectivity In Medical Studies White Paper

Statistics A-Ha Moment The author of this brief reflection has been learning or reabsorbing a number of terms and concepts throughout the duration of the applicable class being completed. During that time, there has been some things that have just made sense and did not take a lot of brainpower or epiphany to make sense of. However, there have been other things that are much more vexing and hard to fathom. The author of this report will focus on one of the latter and the "a-ha!" moment that revealed a revelation. This revelation centers on qualitative studies that are based on perception and opinion and how hard those can be to do properly given how perceptions and feelings can quite easily differ from person to person for even the same phenomenon or even. While medical tests that use a measurement of pain are hard to do right and well, the chapter material covered in this class does prove there is a way to pull it off.

Analysis

The "a-ha!" moment that the author of this report will focus on comes from the material in chapter six. Specifically, the author was scanning through the "Presenting Problem 2" item. As indicated in the...

What caught the eye of the author of this report initially is that there is rating of pain that was done so as to measure the performance of drugs like lidocaine, epinephrine and so forth. Subsequent to that, there is to be a measurement of the patient's pain. The author of this report has always thought out about this because people obviously have different pain thresholds. Perhaps this sort of variance can be "smoothed" out with a large sample size and the like. However, the outliers and such that would be in such a group are going to have some effect on the results even if that affect is nominal and minimal (Dawson & Trapp, 2004).
However, the author came to see the mention of the visual analog scale, or VAS, in the text. Rather than rely solely on subjective and perhaps inaccurate ways of assessing pain, there apparently has been a tool developed to measure the pain experienced in…

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References

Dawson, B. & Trapp, R. (2004). Basic & clinical biostatistics. New York: Lange Medical

Books-McGraw-Hill, Medical Pub. Division.

Hawker, G., Mian, S., Kendzerska, T., & French, M. (2011). Measures of adult pain: Visual

Analog Scale for Pain (VAS Pain), Numeric Rating Scale for Pain (NRS Pain), McGill Pain
S240-S252. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/acr.20543
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