Sherry Chandler

The first robin of spring! Looking a little cold and hunkered in, but hey!

And the goldfinches finding their gold.

Spring is going to come again this year, I think.

And, by the way, I didn’t mean by my last post to discourage any one from taking their meds or getting the proper exercise. I didn’t even really mean that I am discouraged about taking my meds and my calcium. I was just riffing on the in-exactitude of statistics and clinical studies. Medicine, like fiction, is an art, not a science.

As I heard said about Kinky Friedman on 60 Minutes: “He’s independent of everything and of everybody. And sometimes he’s independent of his own brain. His mouth is independent of his brain.”

Having been diagnosed with what they call “osteopenia,” or the beginnings of osteoporosis, you can imagine that I read with some care the report in Thursday’s NYTimes about a new study finding that supplemental calcium and vitamin D don’t do much to help women build and preserve bone. In all that news article, however, I think I was most bemused by this little passage here:

But such subgroup analyses are questioned by many statisticians, who point out that there always will be subgroups in a large study showing one effect or another, simply by chance.

Some subgroups, as happened in this study, will show a positive effect and others, as also happened in this study, will show a negative effect, but those effects often are nothing more than random fluctuations in the data. Over all, searching the data after the study is done in order to find subgroups that support a hypothesis can produce misleading results, statisticians say.

And, added David Freedman, a statistician at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written books on clinical trial design and analysis, women who take their pills as directed year in and year out are known to be different from ordinary women, so it is a mistake to generalize from them to the entire population.

So, I said to my long-time work companion, that means women like you, who stick diet and health regimens religiously, are fundamentally different from women like me, who are more apt to say, “Oh shucks, I forgot my fosamax again this week.” So please, was my metamessage, stop telling me I just need to get more exercise.

I’m more afraid than you are. That was her reply.

Not necessarily, said I. I may be more afraid than you, more in denial.

And it’s true. I may be. Or more fatalistic. More convinced that medicine is as much art as science and more apt to be annoyed by today’s headline: Women’s Health Studies Leave Questions in Place of Certainty . As if anybody ever has certainty.

but I’m pretty sure it was a fantasy. From the NYTimes:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 18 — One of the perquisites of being president is the ability to have the author of a book you enjoyed pop into the White House for a chat.

Over the years, a number of writers have visited President Bush, including Natan Sharansky, Bernard Lewis and John Lewis Gaddis. And while the meetings are usually private, they rarely ruffle feathers.

Now, one has.

In his new book about Mr. Bush, “Rebel in Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush,” Fred Barnes recalls a visit to the White House last year by Michael Crichton, whose 2004 best-selling novel, “State of Fear,” suggests that global warming is an unproven theory and an overstated threat.

Mr. Barnes, who describes Mr. Bush as “a dissenter on the theory of global warming,” writes that the president “avidly read” the novel and met the author after Karl Rove, his chief political adviser, arranged it. He says Mr. Bush and his guest “talked for an hour and were in near-total agreement.”

“The visit was not made public for fear of outraging environmentalists all the more,” he adds.

And so it has, fueling a common perception among environmental groups that Mr. Crichton’s dismissal of global warming, coupled with his popularity as a novelist and screenwriter, has undermined efforts to pass legislation intended to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that leading scientists say causes climate change.

Mr. Crichton, whose views in “State of Fear” helped him win the American Association of Petroleum Geologists’ annual journalism award this month, has been a leading doubter of global warming and last September appeared before a Senate committee to argue that the supporting science was mixed, at best.

Crichton has, of course, always had an anti-science bent, but in the end, he is a novelist. I’d prefer not to bet the farm on his fiction.

On the other hand, I’m not sure I’d bet the farm on anything Fred Barnes says, either.