In the last Statistics in small doses, it was concluded that the triangle of study designs can be misleading if viewed as a hierarchy. The clinical trial, sitting as it does above the observational studies, is considered by many as the ‘gold standard’ of study designs even though it is not suitable, feasible or ethical to use that design to study all research questions. So let us proceed to the pinnacle of the triangle; surely systematic reviews and meta-analyses will give us the right answer – after all, aren’t hours of reading and careful examination involved? Yes, but the summer 2016 edition of Columbia Magazine includes an article that gives us cause for pause – “The great salt debate that wasn’t.”

To that end, next month’s Statistics in small doses journeys into the realm of parametric statistics. We begin with the question, “Why do the tests that inhabit this realm consider their membership ‘exclusive’?”