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Know Your Chances: Understanding Health Statistics / Edition 1

Know Your Chances: Understanding Health Statistics / Edition 1

Know Your Chances: Understanding Health Statistics / Edition 1
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ISBN-10:
0520252225
ISBN-13:
9780520252226
Pub. Date:
11/30/2008
Publisher:
University of California Press
ISBN-10:
0520252225
ISBN-13:
9780520252226
Pub. Date:
11/30/2008
Publisher:
University of California Press
Know Your Chances: Understanding Health Statistics / Edition 1

Know Your Chances: Understanding Health Statistics / Edition 1

Overview

Every day we are bombarded by television ads, public service announcements, and media reports warning of dire risks to our health and offering solutions to help us lower those risks. But many of these messages are incomplete, misleading, or exaggerated, leaving the average person misinformed and confused. Know Your Chances is a lively, accessible, and carefully researched book that can help consumers sort through this daily barrage by teaching them how to interpret the numbers behind the messages. In clear and simple steps, the authors—all of them staff physicians at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in White River Junction, Vermont—take the mystery out of medical statistics. By learning to understand the medical statistics and knowing what questions to ask, readers will be able to see through the hype and find out what—if any—credible information remains. The book's easy-to-understand charts will help ordinary people put their health concerns into perspective.This short, reader-friendly volume will foster communication between patients and doctors and provide the basic critical-thinking skills necessary for navigating today's confusing health landscape.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780520252226
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication date: 11/30/2008
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 158
Product dimensions: 6.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Steven Woloshin, MD, MS, Lisa Schwartz, MD, MS, and H. Gilbert Welch, MD, MPH, are general internists, faculty members at Dartmouth Medical School, and researchers in the VA Outcomes Group, Department of Veterans Affairs, White River Junction, Vermont. Woloshin and Schwartz have written many articles together for leading medical journals, and Welch is the author of Should I Be Tested for Cancer? Maybe Not and Here's Why (UC Press).

Table of Contents

What This Book Is About

PART ONE. WHAT IS MY RISK?
1. Understanding Risk
2. Putting Risk in Perspective
3. Risk Charts: A Way to Get Perspective

PART TWO. CAN I REDUCE MY RISK?
4. Judging the Benefit of a Health Intervention
5. Not All Benefits Are Equal: Understand the Outcome

PART THREE. DOES RISK REDUCTION HAVE DOWNSIDES?
6. Consider the Downsides
7. Do the Benefits Outweigh the Downsides?

PART FOUR. DEVELOPING A HEALTHY SKEPTICISM
8. Beware of Exaggerated Importance
9. Beware of Exaggerated Certainty
10. Who's Behind the Numbers?

EXTRA HELP
Quick Summary
Glossary
Number Converter
Risk Charts
Credible Sources of Health Statistics

Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Short and simple. . . . . Present(s) the basic skills necessary in navigating today's confusing health-media landscape. "—Library Journal

" Delightful and educational reading, simple enough for laypeople to understand yet academic

enough to meet the needs of . . . . students."—Choice

"Know Your Chances is an accessible and empowering text."—Journal of Biosocial Science

"A great reminder that . . . medical claims should always be evaluated by how they affect you and your current state of health."—Tampa Tribune

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