Need help replying to these two classmates.

providing additional examples or support for their argument. Your response must be substantive and demonstrate your statistics knowledge.

State one practical use of variation related to health statistics. Briefly discuss its implications.

Classmate:1

A practical use of variation that is related to health statistics would be determining the specific needs of a patient. An example that I found from Health Catalyst is that if two patients go to the emergency department with pneumonia, but one of the patients has COPD(chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and renal failure and the other patient is healthy other than having pneumonia, then the doctors are going to treat each patient accordingly. The doctors wouldn't treat the patient with COPD and renal failure the same as the patient that is healthy because statistically the dosages could cause one person to get worse rather than the other. If the doctor was to treat each patient the same(dosage), the patient that has COPD and renal failure is then most likely to "risk another form of variation: unintended, or unwanted, variation. This form of variation occurs because the patient was not treated per their specific needs"(Ferguson, 2017). It is important to know the variations when it comes to health statistics to avoid risk of an unwanted variation.

Classmate 2:

Other than temperature, state three examples where similar averages are associated with very different distributions. Go deeper with one, and discuss how that might work in more detail.

Other than temperature, state three examples where similar averages are associated with very different distributions.

One example where a similar average is associated with very different distributions is housing costs. One statistic may state the city's average housing cost is 400,000. The most expensive could be upwards of 700,000, and the lowest price could be 150,000. The average might be 400,000, whereas, in another city, the average cost could be 400,000 because all houses are priced similarly.

The second example is average salaries within a career field. An online posted average salary could state 50,000 as the average. However, one company may pay their higher-level executives 100,000 while entry-level employees in that career field could start at 30,000. The average might be similar, but there would be more of a variation between that company and another company that pays most of its employees around $50,000.

The last example I discovered deals with pharmacogenomics. According to MedlinePlus (2020), pharmacogenomics combines the science of drugs and the study of genes and their functions to develop safe medications based on a person's genetic makeup. In a medication clinical trial for a new drug, researchers will look into the variations in how the drug affected some of the test subjects. Suppose the average is based on a result that is a high or low variation in the clinical study. In that case, the pharmacogenomics researchers will determine if these test subjects have particular genes that could account for the variation. By doing this, these researchers can develop new drugs tailored to groups of people with similar genetic makeups and lessen the risk factors for drugs aimed to treat a wide range of health problems.