Special articleNumbers are better than words: Verbal specifications of frequency have no place in medicine
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2013, Patient Education and CounselingCitation Excerpt :For example, Woloshin et al. [40] found people assigned a lower numeric value to the word ‘unlikely’ when it was used to describe the likelihood of major complications than they did when it was used to describe the likelihood of minor complications. The use of numbers rather than words to communicate probabilities is therefore recommended, where possible, because numbers lead to more accurate and consistent understandings of risk [41,42]. However the impact of providing this information on attitudes towards colorectal screening remains unknown.
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- 1
From the Departments of Anesthesiology and Medicine, Albany Medical College of Union University, Albany, New York (MAN).
- 2
From the Department of Psychiatry, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York (SA).