In the course of writing and teaching, I often have discussed the results of research studies with clinicians and patients. In the process, I found that clinicians and patients needed, and wanted, to learn about the methods used to conduct these studies. In other words, one could not understand the results unless one understood more about the research methods, i.e., statistics. Yet I could find no simple book about statistics which I could recommend to the average clinician or patient, no book which was written in plain English, without excessive mathematics, and which explained the relevance of statistical concepts for the practitioners. So I decided to write it.