The most powerful driver of medical costs is hope

When diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma, a rare cancer with a blighted future, evolutionary biologist and writer, Stephen Jay Gould, turned his attention to the statistics; specifically, the central tendency of survival with the tumor. The central tendency — mean (average), median and mode — project like skyscrapers in a populated city and are the summary statements of a statistical distribution. The “average” is both meaningful and meaningless. The average utility of average is zero. Consider a gamble: a fair coin toss where you get $50 if it lands heads and lose $50 if it lands tails. The average (net) gains of this coin toss, if the coin is thrown hundreds of time, is zero.  But no one gets nothing: You either get $50 or lose $50. The average is twice wrong: It over estimates for some and underestimates for others. But the average of this gamble has important information. It helps you decide if you could profit from making people play this gamble; you wouldn’t profit unless you charged a small fee to play the gamble. The median is the mid-point of a distribution. Gould’s cancer had a median survival of eight months. This meant that half (unlucky half) lived fewer than eight months and half (lucky half) lived more than eight months with the cancer. The mean is affected by outliers but the median is not. For example, consider Mumbai’s billionaires. They raise the average income of the city, not the median income. Skewness of a distribution affects t...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Tags: Physician Cancer Source Type: blogs