Math

Interesting, short piece on the healthcare blog at Forbes.com. The title is great -- "What Homer Simpson Can Teach Oncologists about Math" -- though it's a little bit misleading. The Homer thing is kind of tossed in at the end, but the larger point is more important.

Read the article, especially the first part, which involves a little bit of math. I confess: I got it wrong the first time, and right the second time, when I went back and looked at it a little more slowly and deliberately.

Which is the point, I think. Oncologists throw numbers around (especially numbers involving things like success and survival rates) in ways that make them difficult to understand. Partly, it's because our math education is so poor in this country; it's impractical and hasn't changed in decades. That problem gets worse when people don't pay attention, which is often. And it's worse still when people are dealing with an emotional issue; it's hard to be slow, thoughtful, and rational when some one says the word cancer; everything that comes after that word will be filtered through something like the Oh dear God I'm going to die that runs through our heads.

So it's important that oncologists are the ones who slow down.

Almost every time I've been depressed -- truly, deeply depressed, not just sad -- about cancer, it's been triggered by numbers. Having a trusted authority say to us, "Here's a number. Now here's what it means" would go a long way toward making us feel just a little better.

Of course, it's not entirely on them. We need to educate ourselves a little, and understand what numbers mean on a basic level. if we're going to obsess and do internet searches for statistics that affect us, then it's only fair that we take some responsibility for figuring out what they mean, isn't it?

Start with Stephen Jay Gould's "The Median Isn't the Message." If you read carefully, you might be able to end there, too.