Teaching statistics to health professionals: the legal analogy.

Despite the importance of statistical concepts to health professionals, the teaching of statistics to students from this field has generally been unrewarding. We feel that a few central concepts are crucial to all statistical thinking and that, for most health professionals, the communication of these is more important than learning about complex mathematical models. A device for demonstrating the parallels between a criminal legal trial and statistical hypothesis testing is presented. We feel that it can facilitate the learning of this central statistical concept.