Weighing the Chances at Life's End - NYTimes.com
"........But the grimmer the prognosis, the more inaccurate and more
optimistic the surrogates’ responses became. Only 22 percent correctly
interpreted a statement about what a “5 percent chance of surviving”
meant, while 65 percent answered with greater optimism.
“They
clearly grasped the meaning of these statements,” Dr. White said. “They
were not misunderstanding the numbers. They weren’t misunderstanding the
language.” If that had been the case, you’d expect them to have been
inaccurate about good news, too.
Instead, relatives hearing
doctors deliver dire prognoses just didn’t accept or believe them. They
displayed, in medspeak, “a systematic optimism bias.”
Such bias
has shown up many times before in the medical literature. Cancer
patients enrolled in early phases of clinical trials, for instance,....."
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“Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Albert Einstein
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