Mammograms cut your risk of dying from breast cancer by 20 percent! That's good. But you have a 10 percent chance of being sent on for a biopsy that reveals the scan to be a false positive (ouch)! Or it can lead to unnecessary, unpleasant treatment (ugh). Medical data clearly wants to confuse you—what if one of those people actually saved by a test (or a preventive drug like Tamoxifen) turns out to be you? To help you get your head around this situation, a team at Berlin's Harding Center for Risk Literacy is working on representing the risk/benefit trade-offs. “Often health care providers focus only on the positives of screening,” says Michelle McDowell, a research fellow and leader of the project. “We're helping people weigh the benefits and harms.” One good thing about hard data: It can get your blood pressure back down to normal.
Source: Harding Center For Risk Literacy
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