Danny wanted Redelmeier to find him a real-world medical example of what he was calling the “peak-end rule.” It didn’t take long for Redelmeier to come up with a bunch, but they settled on colonoscopies. In the late 1980s, colonoscopies were painful, and not merely dreaded. The discomfort of the procedure dissuaded people from returning for another one. By 1990, colon cancer was killing sixty thousand people every year in the United States alone. Many of its victims would have survived had their cancer been detected at an early stage. One of the big reasons colon cancer went undetected was
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