Nelie - That saying about statisticians is partly tongue in cheek (so fitting on this site), and partly to say: Research invites bias. Most research is as much political as it is scientific - funding sources, accountability loops, peer reviews, referees, publication rights and more. Data about a thing is only a map of the thing - not the thing itself. Understanding the data does not lead to real understanding, just description. Setting a description onto paper forces the author to limit how much is said. Good journal work requires summation, abbreviation, encapsulation. A map does not illuminate understanding, it only gives dimensions. Statistics, powerfully descriptive though they may be, trick us into limited understanding and invite bias.

None of us in this forum listened to the odds of our survival. H/N cancers killed most people until quite recently. Statistics about a particular treatment only describe the experiences of a few - and never the experiences of one. The numbers give us indicators, trends, directions of change, possible relationships between variables, ideas about what is happening. They do not illuminate, explain or describe how one will be. Data from the clinical trials of a new chemo drug do very little to describe or predict what my experience with that drug will be - just a well educated guess. I cannot understand that drug for me from the data, only from my experience with it.

And Eileen - forgive me for implying that all drinkers are alcoholic. They are not. But a powerful number of them are and most of those deny this, and deny that alcohol causes them any problems. In all my years in the treatment business, I never met an alcoholic with a drinking problem. Lots with money, or wife, or job problems, but hey 'there's nothing wrong with my drinking.' Hiding behind the rare but visible "gutter drunk" image, lots of drinkers explain away their drinking behaviors as not that bad. Ok. The National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse estimates that 10% of adults in our culture have serious drinking problems. Subract out the abstainers, and that leaves lots of folks impacted. We all defend our own behaviors. I had an MD tell me (with a straight face)once that his definition of an alcoholic was anyone who drank more than he did. nuff said. Its all relative and I'm ok. Thanks for the clarification. Tom