There’s a running joke among radiologists: finding a tumor in a mammogram is akin to finding a snowball in a blizzard. A bit of medical gallows humor, this simile illustrates the difficulties of finding signals (the snowball) against a background of noise (the blizzard). Doctors are faced with similar difficulties every day when sifting through
There’s a running joke among radiologists: finding a tumor in a mammogram is akin to finding a snowball in a blizzard. A bit of medical gallows humor, this simile illustrates the difficulties of finding signals (the snowball) against a background of noise (the blizzard). Doctors are faced with similar difficulties every day when sifting through piles of data from blood tests to X-rays to endless lists of patient symptoms.
Diagnoses are often just educated guesses, and prognoses less certain still. There is a significant amount of uncertainty in the daily practice of medicine, resulting in confusion and potentially deadly complications. Dr. Steven Hatch argues that instead of ignoring this uncertainty, we should embrace it. By digging deeply into a number of rancorous controversies, from breast cancer screening to blood pressure management, Hatch shows us how medicine can failsometimes spectacularlywhen patients and doctors alike place too much faith in modern medical technology. The key to good health might lie in the ability to recognize the hype created by so many medical reports, sense when to push a physician for more testing, or resist a physician’s enthusiasm when unnecessary tests or treatments are being offered.
Both humbling and empowering, Snowball in a Blizzard lays bare the inescapable murkiness that permeates the theory and practice of modern medicine. Essential reading for physicians and patients alike, this book shows how, by recognizing rather than denying that uncertainty, we can all make better health decisions.
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Fascinating book about the uncertainty of medical statistics This is a book about uncertainty in the theory and practice of modern medicine. Its premise is simple: namely, that doctors do not often “know” what they are doing with the kind of mathematical precision that we associate with rocket scientists or chemical engineers. A diagnosis is, much more often than not, an educated guess, and a prognosis is typically less certain than that.What makes this book special is the remarkable style of the author.. It should be of…
Great food for thought Great book! Dr. Hatch illustrates the importance of understanding the level of uncertainty that health care professionals (and patients) face daily. While the content relates specifically to medicine, the lessons can be extrapolated to our approach to the rest of the sciences and even to life in general. In today’s world, both professional and lay person alike are bombarded with information. As humans we are predisposed to fit that information into a category of true/untrue. While this mode of…
Certainly Uncertain Medicine has protected itself, its providers and its recipients from uncertainty and yet we know so little about health and illness, aetiology, diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. We have blurred the lines between normal and abnormal, and medicalised where we don’t know whether we should or should not. While this is perhaps hard to accept, given our diet of fads and fantasies, our short term memory and even shorter term attention span, it’s certainly the case. The risk however is when we…