Know Your Chances

A friend highly recommends this book by some folks at Dartmouth Medical School, entitled Know Your Chances. The idea is to provide a simple description of how you can evaluate publicly propagated information about diseases and therapies. Here's more. An excerpt:

From drug companies to disease advocacy groups, everyone "is trying to grab your attention by making their disease sound as common or as dangerous as they can," says Dr. Lisa Schwartz. But in the process, lots of messages get exaggerated. It can be tough for patients to cut through the hype and determine what—if any—accurate information remains.

So Schwartz and two other members of the DMS faculty—Drs. Steven Woloshin and Gilbert Welch—wrote a book to help people assess messages about health statistics.