If a medical treatment for a life-threatening disease had a 60 percent chance of success, but another treatment with a 50 percent success rate had a lower risk of bankrupting your family, which would you choose? What if the success rates were 95 and 90 percent? Would you change your answer?,” a new Future Tense Fiction story written by B. Pladek. The story’s main character, Chase, works for a private company that helps people navigate these numbers.
Getting these percentages wrong harms current and future patients alike. For instance, if providers overstate the effectiveness of radiotherapy or understate its associated bankruptcy risk, current patients may be misled to sacrifice too much financial health in return for a smaller-than-expected return in terms of physical health. And when current patients accept inferior therapies, their choices send the wrong signals to the developers of new therapies, harming future patients.
For starters, it is practically impossible for patients to detect on their own when the risk estimates of competing therapies are off. These are not easily verifiable predictions. By contrast, each time we check the weather forecast, read a stock picker’s report, listen to a podcast’s predictions on how our favorite football team will do this weekend, or consult a route planner for predicted traffic patterns, we can observe how accurate these predictions are over time.
Metrics, it's all metrics...being done by those who pull the money strings.
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