The raison d’etre of MDWhistleblower is to give readers a peek ‘behind the medical curtain’. This post is true to this mission.
I offer readers a lesson that I have shared with patients,
friends and family over the years. I
suspect that elements of my point have been covered in prior posts. As I have penned over 800 posts since 2009, I
hope readers will forgive me of an example or two of repetition.
There is a frequent technique that I’m about to share that
misleads patients about the value of various medical tests or treatments. While these communications to the public are
technically true, they are misleading.
Let me explain.
If you saw a product or medical test from reputable
organizations that promised to cut your risk of a heart attack by 30%, would
you be interested? Odds
are that you would be very interested.
Who wouldn’t want their risk of a heart attack to be cut by nearly a
third?
Medicine is riddled with similar promises of benefit for
various conditions offering attractive relative risk reductions for various conditions.
Please follow this paragraph below very carefully. Understanding my point will greatly empower you.
With respect to the heart attack example above, you must know what your existing risk of a heart attack is. (There are simple formulas available that calculate your risk of a cardiac event over the next several years.) For most of us, our risk of a heart attack is fortunately quite low. Let’s assume that an individual has a 2% risk of suffering a heart attack over the next 5 years. In other words, this person is already very unlikely to have a heart attack. Reducing his already very low 2% risk of heart attack by 30% will lower the heart attack risk to 1.4%. This is referred to as the absolute risk reduction.
When viewed in these terms, most folks wouldn’t find this trivial risk reduction to be a game changer, even though it is a ‘30% reduction in risk.. And,
if the risk-reducing medication carried some risk, then the argument favoring
it becomes even weaker.
I’m not advising for or against any specific treatments that
your physician may recommend or you may have read about. I do want patients to realize that relative
risk reductions, such as I presented with my 30% heart attack example, can be very
misleading. Absolute risk reductions, in
contrast, give much more meaningful information with respect to the benefit that
the individual would truly enjoy.
The medical profession, like so many other occupations and organizations, looks a lot different 'behind the curtain’.
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