A terrific article about the value of shared decision making using BRCTs

Today Kaiser Health News reporter Jay Hancock wrote a very illuminating and informative article about the BRCT concept.

In the article is a video produced by Kaiser Health News that very clearly demonstrates how a BRCT can distill a complex issue down to a very simple an accurate graphic. The video, which uses Mammograms as an example, employs animation to explain the difference between relative and absolute risk/benefit. While many groups state that life time mammograms can reduce the risk of breast cancer death by 20%, that deceptive number obscures a more revealing truth: if out of 1000 people 5 women die from breast cancer who do not get mammograms, while 4 people die from breast cancer when they do get mammograms, that is a 20% reduction in cancer. However, as the BRCT above shows, the actual benefit of mammography is that out of 1000 women who undergo lifelong mammogram, one will avoid a breast cancer death compared to 1000 women who do not undergo mammograms. The video also shows that many women suffer significant side effects from undergoing mammograms, again depicted in a graphic format.

Jay Hancock's article looks at many ways that BRCTs can be used to understand medical issues, and discusses how risks and benefits of interventions are best understood using actual probabilities that are depicted in a simple to understand theater diagram. Rather than using confusing numbers and percentages, rather than relying on deceptive relative risk numbers, BRCTs lay out simply what the actual risks and benefits are. Read and share Jay's article. Again, the article can be found on NPR's website at http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/10/12/497549732/skip-the-math-researchers-paint-a-picture-of-health-benefits-and-risks

Learn more about the BRCT concept and what can be done with it at my other website: www.doc-patient-talk.com