What the Odds Fail to Capture When a Health Crisis Hits

How well do we understand and act on probabilities that something will happen? A 30 percent chance of this or an 80 percent chance of that? As it turns out, making decisions based on the odds can be an extremely difficult thing to do, even for people who study the science of how we make decisions.

Brian Zikmund-Fisher teaches about risk and probability at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Back in 1998, when he was studying behavioral decision theory in graduate school, he was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome. Zikmund-Fisher was told that without treatment he'd have about 10 years to live. The other option was a bone marrow transplant that had a 70 percent chance of curing him and ensuring a normal life.

"But the transplant itself — because of the chemotherapy, because of the infection risks — had roughly a 25 to 30 percent chance of killing me within six months to a year," Zikmund-Fisher says. 

At the time, Zikmund-Fisher was 28, married, and had a child on the way. Ultimately, he made his life-or-death decision based on factors even he couldn't quantify. He concluded that with no transplant and 10 years of life, he would get to know his then-unborn daughter, but she would remember him as a father in and out of hospitals. Those were not the 10 years he wanted. So he chose to gamble on the transplant.

• Access Podcast: What the Odds Fail to Capture When a Health Crisis Hits (~6 min)
• Access Transcript: What the Odds Fail to Capture When a Health Crisis Hits

This podcast was one of six in a series that focused on how we interpret and communicate probability and uncertainty, produced by All Things Considered, NPR.

Extracted from accompanying podcast description.