Three kinds of lies.

Everyone is familiar with the famous quote from Benjamin Disraeli about lies and statistics, but we depend on statistics to evaluate the claims made by most articles published in the ophthalmic literature. The article in this issue by Lisboa et al (See page 1317) found that only 21% of the publications in 3 major ophthalmology journals in 2012 used simple descriptive statistics (percentages, means, medians, histograms, and standard deviations). The authors claim that to understand 50% of the articles published would require knowledge of 15 statistical methods and that comprehension of 90% of articles would require familiarity with 29 statistical methods. These 29 methods include some fairly obscure techniques such as multiway tables, sensitivity analysis, and receiver operating characteristics. Their article raises important questions about how the readers of Ophthalmology, and especially the reviewers of these manuscripts, can judge the validity of the claims supposedly proved by statistics. We should not accept as fact that a new treatment is superior to another based on statistical analysis alone, especially because the statistical methods may be erroneous.