Scare-tistics

 It's clickbait.

“Just one sunburn increases your chances of getting cancer by 100%!”

“People who don’t eat [food] have a 20% greater risk of colon cancer!”

“You have all the risk factors for skin cancer.”

“People with a family history of [malady] have a 40% greater chance of getting [malady] than the rest of the population does.”

Sigh. Just what my nerves need to hear. But what is my risk? What are the odds of my having [malady]? You notice that the news articles never really give you that information?

Scare-tistics. That’s what I’m starting to call the numbers tossed around by media outlets, often concerning health topics but also environment, health insurance, and the like. The goal is to get you to stop and watch/listen/read. Scare-tistics are not really helpful.

For example, and I’ll pull numbers out of the air, because the news piece came out a few years ago, but there was breathless reportage that “breast cancer diagnoses are up over thirty percent from forty years ago!” and implied that some dreadful thing in the environment was causing breast cancer. To which the person in my family who works in a related medical field snorted and said something that rhymes with “pulpit.” What has happened is that 1) mammography has become cheap and common, and 2) because of that and better technology and imaging, more and more tumors are found that would not have been caught before because of their tiny size. Many of those are very slow-growing, most are not malignant at the time of discovery and are tracked but not removed.

Of those diagnosed with cancer, back before mammograms, sometimes the woman would have died of something else first without anyone guessing that they had breast cancer, like my great-grandparent. She/He died of heart failure and his/her autopsy revealed un-diagnosed [organ]* cancer. Her/His heart got him/her, not the cancer. She/He was in his/her 80s. Today, there are women in their 90s who are diagnosed with breast cancer, but who are suffering from other maladies that will do them in long before the cancer would.