Woody Allen defined major surgery as "anything being done to me."
Woody Allen defined major surgery as "anything being done to me."
When it comes to evaluating medical risk -- or risk of any kind, for that matter -- it gets very personal, and when we're weighing threats to ourselves or to others we care about, we tend to think with our hearts rather than our heads.
As Seen on TV
A sobering example of emotions overcoming reason when weighing personal risk came in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, when many people who were frightened by images of airplanes crashing into buildings took to the roads instead of flying. But according to the National Safety Council, your lifetime odds of dying in a car accident are 1 in 242, compared with 1 in 4,608 of dying in all "air and space transport" mishaps combined. Take the bus, and those odds shrink to about 1 in 179,000.
One picture can indeed be worth a thousand words, and public perceptions about risk are often shaped by television news, which has immediacy and visceral impact, but might not provide careful reflection or thoughtful analysis.
| Cause of Death | Lifetime Odds of Dying* | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Car crash | 1 in 242 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Drowning | 1 in 1,028 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Plane crash | 1 in 4,508 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lightning strike | 1 in 71,501 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bitten or struck by dog | 1 in 137,694 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Venomous spider bite | 1 in 716,010 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| *for someone born in 2000 Source: National Safety Council | ? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
"In my opinion, it has a lot to do with the way the media handles the reporting of it. I think there are times when the media tends to overstate certain issues especially when it comes to medical problems. Obviously the media is very helpful in disseminating information, but if things are overstated, then they can result in people overreacting," Michael I. Greenberg, MD, MPH, editor-in-chief of The Journal of Medical Risk, tells WebMD.
