Is honey a cough remedy? Refer to the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine (Dec....

Is honey a cough remedy? Refer to the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine (Dec. 2007) study ofhoney as a remedy for coughing, Exercise 2.32 (p. 45).Recall that the 105 ill children in the sample were randomlydivided into groups. One group received a dosage of anover-the-counter cough medicine (DM); another groupreceived a dosage of honey (H). The coughing improvementscores (as determined by the children’s parents) forthe patients in the two groups are reproduced in the accompanyingtable and saved in the HONEYCOUGH file. Thepediatric researchers desire information on the variation incoughing improvement scores for each of the two groups.

a. Find a 90% confidence interval for the standard deviation in improvement scores for the honey dosage group.

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b. Repeat part a for the DM dosage group.

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c. Based on the results, parts a and b, what conclusions can the pediatric researchers draw about which group has the smaller variation in improvement scores?

Based on Paul, I. M., et al. “Effect of honey, dextromethorphan, and no treatment on nocturnal cough and sleep quality for coughing children and their parents.” Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine , Vol. 161, No. 12, Dec. 2007 (data simulated).

Is honey a cough remedy? Does a teaspoon of honey before bed really calm a child’s cough? To test the folk remedy, pediatric researchers at Pennsylvania State University carried out a designed study involving a sample of 105 children who were ill with an upper respiratory tract infection (Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine , Dec. 2007). On the first night, parents rated their children’s cough symptoms on a scale from 0 (no problems at all) to 30 (extremely severe). On the second night, the parents were instructed to give their sick child a dosage of liquid “medicine” prior to bedtime. Unknown to the parents, some were given a dosage of dextromethorphan (DM)—an over-the-counter cough medicine—while others were given a similar dose of honey. Also, a third group of parents (the control group) gave their sick children no dosage at all. Again, the parents rated their children’s cough symptoms, and the improvement in total cough symptoms score was determined for each child. The data (improvement scores) for the study are shown in the table (p. 46) and saved in the HONEYCOUGH file.

a. Construct a dot plot for the coughing improvement scores for the 35 children in the honey dosage group.

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b. Refer to part a. What coughing improvement score occurred most often in the honey dosage group?

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Honey Dosage:	12	11	15	11	10	13	10	4	15	16	9
	14	10	6	10	8	11	12	12	8	12	9
	11	15	10	15	9	13	8	12	10	8	9
	5	12
DM Dosage:	4	6	9	4 7	7	7	9	12	10	11	6
	3	4	9	12 7	6	8	12	12	4	12	13
	7	10	13	9 4	4	10	15	9
No Dosage (Control):	5	8	6	1 0	8	12	8 7	7	1	6 7	7
	12	7	9	7 9	5	11	9 5	6	8	8 6	7
	10	9	4	8 7	3	1	4 3

Based on Paul, I. M., et al. “Effect of honey, dextromethorphan, and no treatment on nocturnal cough and sleep quality for coughing children and their parents.” Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, Vol. 161, No. 12, Dec. 2007 (data simulated).

c. A MINITAB dot plot for the improvement scores of all three groups is shown above. Note that the green dots represent the children who received a dose of honey, the red dots represent those who got the DM dosage, and the black dots represent the children in the control group. What conclusions can pediatric researchers draw from the graph? Do you agree with the statement (extracted from the article), “Honey may be a preferable treatment for the cough and sleep difficulty associated with childhood upper respiratory tract infection”?