I started writing this weeks’ blog post about a recent article I saw in the online magazine Vox regarding the safety and benefits of statins (the most commonly used type of medication for cholesterol lowering). However, once I started writing I realized that I needed to make a major digression to explain the concept of “Number Needed to Treat”, which in turn doesn’t fully make sense until one understands the concepts of relative versus absolute risk. So I will instead make this weeks’ entry another in my series on how to read and interpret the medical literature and defer my thoughts on the Vox article to a future post.
