Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
May 03, 2006
Scientific ignorance and the doctor-patient relationship
Category: Intentionality • Learning and testing • Research
Americans, as any ScienceBlogger will tell you, have a woefully poor understanding of math and science. For the most part, even the most ignorant among us are able to stumble through life, but what happens when we're confronted with a genuine scientific question with a real impact on our lives?
Consider the typical doctor's office scenario: the doctor asks a breast cancer patient to decide on a treatment. "There's a 30 percent chance of recurrence in five years," she tells the patient, "but with chemotherapy, the chance is reduced to 10 percent." If the patient doesn't have a basic understanding of probability, she can't make an informed decision about whether to undergo treatment.
Doctors are likely to be better educated than the vast majority of their patients, so how does this discrepancy impact the way they share information about medical risk with their patients? Andrea Gurmankin Levy and Jonathan Baron devised a study to try to understand the difference between doctors' and patients' concept of medical risk.
Posted by Dave Munger at 03:00 PM • Comments (8)
