The goal of this book is to help you better understand health information by teaching you about the numbers behind the messages—the medical statistics on which the claims are based. The book will also familiarize you with risk charts, which are designed to help you put your health concerns in perspective. By learning to understand the numbers and knowing what questions to ask, you’ll be able to see through the hype and find the credible information—if any—that remains.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of James and Carlin Naify as members of the Publisher’s Circle of the University of California Press Foundation.
We would like to thank the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Cancer Institute, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Generalist Faculty Scholar Program for their support. And we thank Emma, Eli, and Heather for making everything so much fun. This book is dedicated to the memory of Leonard Schwartz.
Suggested citation:
Know Your Chances: Understanding Health Statistics, by Steven, Woloshin, Lisa M. Schwartz, and H. Gilbert Welch. © 2008 by the Regenets of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press.
Know Your Chances: Understanding Health Statistics is hereby licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license, which permits copying, distribution, and transmission of the work, provided the original work is properly cited, not used for commercial purposes, nor is altered or transformed.