I recently had to have some minor surgery. However, there's a body of thought that says it's safe to wait and watch for symptoms, and only have surgery later. There's a peer reviewed (I assume) paper supporting this position.

Upon reading this paper I found what looked like a statistical error. Looking at outcomes between two groups, they report p = 0.52, but doing the sums myself I got p = 0.053. For this reason, I went and had the surgery.

Since I'm just a novice at statistics, I was wondering if I had in fact got it right - it's disturbing to think that a peer reviewed paper stating an important conclusion would be wrong.

If any dan-level statistician here has the inclination, I'll post a link to the paper here for your perusal...