|
I'm curious whether all the doctors they surveyed were practicing gynecologists. Most of the doctors I've seen always put things in terms not of real statistics, but of their own experiences. My OB didn't tell me the numerical risks of having a normal delivery after having a caesarian section, for example, because he didn't know them--instead he described the possible outcome, and said that he'd never had it happen for any of his patients, but that it did happen "sometimes." On the other hand, when telling me the risks of an amniocentesis, he very gravely told me that he had indeed seen it happen a handful of times in his career. If most women over 35 in his practice are getting mammograms every year, why wouldn't a physician have a general sense that 9 out of 10 of the positive mammograms he'd seen in his practice had turned out to be negative after all?
|