| ||What Your Doctor Is Saying || | What Are the Odds?
Understanding Risk Last reviewed on September 12, 2012 By Robert
H. Shmerling, M.D. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center "If you
take this medication, you will reduce your risk of disease by
20%, and 98% of people taking it have no serious side effects."
Sounds good, right? Perhaps not. What if your chance of getting
the disease is only one in 1,000 but two people out of every 100
experience a deadly side effect? Talk About Risk Doctors,
nurses, reporters and drug advertisers often talk about risk,
though they may not call it that. In fact, they often use other
terms that sound logical and understandable such as "chance" or
"likelihood" (as in "if you smoke, you will increase your
chances of having lung disease"). Alternatively, they may couch
the terms in personal experience (as in "I think this medicine
will help you; it works for most of my patients"). Or, the
message may be even more vague: When a doctor says "I think this
therapy will help and I doub