I was fortunate to have the opportunity to speak at an evidence-based veterinary medicine conference organized by RCVS Knowledge in London last October. The recordings of those presentations, and all the others given at the conference, are now available online. I hope they contain something interesting or useful for you.
Evidence-based Veterinary Medicine in the Trenches
Potential Sources of Bias in the Veterinary Literature
Nice hat. 🙂 You mentioned about math you are not qualified to understand. Who runs the math? I knew a physicist who other physicist would hire privately to “run the math” on projects they had to complete as part of their job. Even though they had a PhD in physics they could not do the math or at least knew it would take them so long to do it correctly they hired someone else privately to do it. When I see a study in vet medicine that is or is not statistically significant I always wonder how many reading the study would have the ability to do the math to confirm that.
Yes, it always seems ridiculous that any clinical trial should be designed, conducted, or reported without the input of a statistician. Even with my rudimentary statistics, I spot errors in published trials all the time, and there are probably many more I miss. We waste a lot of resources on trials unable to generate useful evidence because they are not properly designed, and we get a lot of misleading information from inappropriate statistical analysis.