With advances in technologies like cancer screening, we need to be as clear as possible when stating results in terms of probabilities It’s not just patients who sometimes find risks and probabilities difficult to understand. Doctors can be challenged by them too. In an experiment in 2004, psychologist Professor Gigerenzer and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development set a group of experienced doctors the following problem: About 1% of women

NHS Choices reckons health reporting has been improving with ‘wonder cures’ hitting the headlines less often and peer-reviewed medial reports covered more responsibly. But the paper illustrated, the Daily Express, is a ‘dishonourable exception’ to the trend, according to the Department of Health-supported information site, which monitors how reports of new therapies and treatments are handled by the media. However ‘headlines can often give a different impression’. Rely on them and you

That’s the headline we were looking for…but didn’t see. Instead, in the midst of the excitement around the US Powerball lottery jackpot - odds of hitting the $550m (£344m) jackpot were calculated at one in 175 million – statisticians were reported as saying that you have more chance of getting struck by lightning or dying from a bee sting than scooping the jackpot. Comparing winning the lottery with the risk of dying may be intended to get us

We are all being encouraged to make informed decisions and choices about our health. But to do this we need communication around the benefits and risks of different screening and treatment options available to us to be as clear as possible. Whilst recent media coverage  has focused on the ‘harm’ attached to breast cancer screening…NHS Choices has unwrapped the facts. In the main, the media story has been the undoubted anxiety attached to false

On Thursday 18 October, the eve of getstats‘ second anniversary, BBC Four will be showing a documentary on statistics and probability. ‘Tails You Win:the science of chance” will be presented by David Spiegelhalter, Royal Statistical Society fellow, getstats board member and long-time champion for greater statistical literacy in society. We spoke to David about what it was like to make the BBC documentary, and how to engage teenagers in the

Remember BBC Four’s amazing The Joy of Stats…? Well, for those of you who have seen it and for those of you who have not (where have you been!?), the producers –  Wingspan  – have created something wonderful again. This time for everyone interested (or not yet interested, but soon will be) in numbers, chance, risk and probability. The new production entitled “Tails you win – the science of chance” is

Pop a pill and you’re cured. In media reporting it often seems as simple as that. Take aspirin daily and you won’t get cancer. Put more subtly, take aspirin and your chances of getting cancer are reduced by a finite amount. Except they’re not. What we have is a body of evidence, being added to over the months and years by new studies, but not evidence of the kind that

We’re hoping to use the summer break from parliamentary politics – isn’t it amazing how political news dries up when MPs are absent? – to think about what stats our parliamentary representatives work with. What is the basic equipment an MP needs to operate as a legislator, select committee member, policy debater, constituency activist and so on? We’d like your ideas. For example, MPs fixate on figures to do with electoral

Understanding stats is vitally important – whether it comes to working out your pension, understanding screening programmes for disease or placing a bet on the winner of the Tour de France. But stats isn’t always easy. Measures of risk, for example, can be ‘tricky stuff’, says David Spiegelhalter, the eminent Cambridge statistician. That’s why a new study commissioned by the Nuffield Foundation is welcome. It looks at how children grasp probability, and

Doctors are many things: counsellors, scientists, pillars of the community, small businesspeople, bureaucrats, heroines of public health. Whatever else, they do need to know some stats. How else do they talk intelligibly to patients or anyone else about risk and probability – and most diagnoses and nearly all therapies have elements of uncertainty in and around them. But the evidence is that many doctors either didn’t do stats in their medical training