ABSTRACT
In the later years of my career in clinical pharmacology, I was transferred to a strategic job on a committee which oversaw early clinical development of drugs in humans. A big part of this job was managing the interactions of the biostatistics and data management organization with a bunch of “data-happy” clinicians. This adjective data-happy refers to medics who love to collect data and want someone to analyze it until, as they say, the data pleads for mercy. Most often it is the statistician involved who ends up pleading for an end to the analysis. Data seldom speaks for themselves; someone usually has to interpret them. It is beneficial when working with such data-happy people to train them to perform such exploratory statistical analyses themselves. Such an action tends to cure their state of “data-happiness” quite effectively.
