Questions:  "Giving IV fluids to trauma victims found harmful", 28 Oct 94,
             NY Times, p. A9.

Journal Article:  "Immediate versus delayed fluid resuscitation for
                   hypotensive patients with penetrating torso injuries",
                   W.H. Bickell et al., 27 Oct 94, The New England Journal
                   of Medicine, v. 331, no. 17, pp. 1105-1109.

1a)  What were the two treatments in the study?
 b)  Who were the subjects?  How many subjects were there?
 c)  What pre-treatment characteristics were recorded?
 d)  What were the main outcome measurements?

2)  Describe the method of treatment assignment.  Why do you think they did
    not assign treatments randomly?

3)  Was the treatment assignment blind to the subjects?  The doctors?

4)  The report gives details on how the sample size was chosen.  Describe
    what they did and what reasoning they used to decide the sample size.

5)  Seeing the results, do you think the sample size turned out to be too
    small, too large, or reasonable?

6)  Given the information in the report, do you think the article title,
    "Giving IV Fluids to Trauma Victims Found Harmful," is a reasonable
    claim?

7)  Among the 238 patients in the delayed-resuscitation group who survived
    to the post-operative period, 55 (23%) had one or more complications. 
    Among the 227 patients in the immediate-resuscitation group who survived
    to the post-operative period, 69 (30%) had complications.  This
    comparison does not take into account the patients who died right away.
    How does this adjustment affect this comparison?

8)  If you have covered p-values in your statistics courses, explain how the
    the p-value in the first row of Table 5 was determined.  What does the
    p-value of 0.04 tell you?

9)  Why do you think pregnant women were excluded from the study?  What
    about those in car accidents?

10) If you could add one paragraph to the newspaper article to give more
    information from the study, what would you say?