The anecdotal success stories about CAM—and the tragic anecdotes about the MMR vaccine—are disproportionately misleading, not just because the statistical context is missing, but because of their ‘high availability’: they are dramatic, associated with strong emotion, and amenable to strong visual imagery. They are concrete and memorable, rather than abstract. No matter what you do with statistics about risk or recovery, your numbers will always have inherently low psychological availability, unlike miracle cures, scare stories, and distressed parents.
