Medical statistics

[1] Medical statistics has been a recognized branch of statistics in the United Kingdom for more than 40 years, but the term has not come into general use in North America, where the wider term 'biostatistics' is more commonly used.

It is the science of summarizing, collecting, presenting and interpreting data in medical practice, and using them to estimate the magnitude of associations and test hypotheses.

It not only provides a way of organizing information on a wider and more formal basis than relying on the exchange of anecdotes and personal experience, but also takes into account the intrinsic variation inherent in most biological processes.

[4] The P value is the probability of no effect or no difference (null hypothesis) of obtaining a result essentially equal to what was actually observed.

The P stands for probability and measures how likely it is that any observed difference between groups is due to chance.