Health statistics may be hazardous to our mental health. Inundated by numbers purporting to predict everything from our likelihood of dying from cancer to our chances of contracting AIDS, we respond with a curious range of reactions that rarely reflect the true nature of the alleged risk. We ignore real dangers while reacting emotionally to phantoms; we blithely accept dubious conclusions while disbelieving sensible ones; or we simply (or not so simply) misinterpret the numbers. (The National Council on Unchallengeable Statistics reports that 88.47 percent of us have one of these five reactions 5.61 times a day, leading to 452,888,988,750 cases of dyscalculia recorded in this country annually.)
Part of the problem lies in our psychological inability to confront either numbers or health hazards with anything approaching objectivity. Another aspect of the problem is mathematical; it stems from our ignorance about the oddities of statistical analysis itself. A third is factual: if we don't know how the statistics in question were obtained, then we can't possibly know what they really mean.
The psychological obstacles to rational understanding of statistics are the most familiar. Consider the near panic that ensued last year when a guest on a national talk show blamed his wife's recent death from brain cancer on her use of a cellular telephone--a case that in some ways serves as a paradigm for many recent health scares. The man alleged that there was a causal connection between his wife's frequent use of their cellular phone and her subsequent brain cancer. He sued (the case is still pending), and the concomitant media delirium created fear, confusion, and a decline in the stock prices of the companies that manufacture cellular phones.
