Medicine relies on statistics more than ever, but these numerical insights aren’t always useful to our health and well-being. Statistics can help us make healthy decisions but they should not be used as a day-to-day instruction manual.
Statistics can be misleading. There is a 12.9 percent lifetime risk that a woman born in the United States will get breast cancer at some point in their life. It’s also true that there’s a 100 percent lifetime risk that we will die at some point. All that really matters is what is happening with you, the individual, at any given time.
