"Battered data"--some clinical effects of the abuse of multiple regression methods: a second look at some...

The paper presents an argument for the wider use of simple and standard statistical methods in the design and evaluation of both laboratory and clinical experiments with toxic radiosensitizers. It also presents an argument against the frequent practice of superposing a curve estimated from laboratory observations upon scattergrams of clinical observations to thereby assist the reader to the (often fallacious) inference that the two disparate sets of observations have enough in common to be graduated by the same curve. Such a practice achieves a substitution of reasoning by analogy for the more reliable statistical procedures of estimation and of testing a hypothesis.