Doctors are surprisingly bad at understanding the science of probability

Dr Daniel Morgan, (an associate professor of epidemiology, public health and infectious diseases at the University of Maryland School of Medicine) has found in his research that many physicians misunderstand test results or think tests are more accurate than they are. Doctors especially fail to grasp how false positives work, which means they make crucial…

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What do Dogs and BreastDefense have in Common?

Some biologists think that a target of 99% accuracy for any cancer screen is unattainable. It seems that SignPost is not alone in this pursuit. According to a company called BioScent Dx, dogs are able to smell minute changes in a human bio-markers including hormones, proteins and other organic compounds. This has lead to dogs…

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The Sharks and The Minnows

The wide net of cancer detection is picking up the Sharks – the aggressive tumors – and the Minnows- the non-aggressive tumors. “We are not seeing enough of the really lethal cancers, and we’re finding too many of the slow moving ones that probably don’t need to be found” says Laura Esserman, a breast cancer…

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