You consult your research and see short-term survival rates: 90 percent for surgery and 100 percent for radiation. What would you pick? What about if, instead, you read about short-term mortality rates—10 percent for surgery and 0 percent for radiation? In a now-famous study, health care researcher Barbara McNeil asked physicians to make that exact hypothetical choice. And she asked one group of doctors to choose based on survival rates and the other group on death rates. Perhaps alarmingly, the exact same information, presented in two different ways, resulted in vastly different decisions.
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