In 1974, a former physician turned mathematician, David M. Eddy, was asked to give a talk on medical decision making, and chose to focus on diagnostic mammography since Betty Ford’s and Happy Rockefeller’s breast cancers were very much in the news at the time. Years later, he wrote that he had “planned to write out the decision tree I presumed their physicians had used, fully expecting to find strong evidence, good numbers, and sound reasoning that I could describe to my audience. But to my amazement I found very few numbers, no formal rationale, and blatant errors in reasoning. How could that
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