Article Text

Download PDFPDF
A simple paper-based patient decision aid
  1. Magnus Hird
  1. Bloomfield Medical Centre; Blackpool, UK

    Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Illustrating risk and benefit to help patients make decisions about treatment (or no treatment) remains a challenge to health professionals. Many people have difficulty understanding numbers. This is compounded by the use of different denominators (eg, 1 in 50 v 3 in 100) that often occurs when professionals relay statistics from research. But good communication of numerical information is important. Rare events can be perceived as more likely than they really are, whereas more common outcomes are dismissed as unlikely. The lack of context for many probabilities also impairs judgment, and all of this ignores the other perceptual factors at play, …

    View Full Text